The Swimming-Pool Library

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CEO of Celtic Leisure, which runs Neath Leisure Centre on behalf of the local authority, Richard Lewis (Image: WalesOnline/Rob Browne)

Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1954 and grew up around Cirencester, where his parents - his father was a bank manager, and he was their only child - encouraged his enthusiasm for listening to music. After public school at Canford, in Dorset, Hollinghurst went to Magdalen College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate Prize for poetry the year before Andrew Motion. 'My first impressions, which got stronger as I knew him, were that he was exceptionally clever,' Motion recalls, 'with an extraordinary range of cultural knowledge. And he spoke extremely elegantly, rather as he writes, with developed periods and an unfading, steady sense of the high style.' Hollinghurst enjoyed his time at Canford, and wrote enthusiastically about it in the old boys' magazine, the Canfordian, a couple of years ago, recalling with affection two teachers who had opened his mind to poetry, painting and architecture. The critic Peter Parker, who was at school with him, says he "never thought of him as a boy – he always seemed old". Parker recalls that Hollinghurst had a self-deprecating manner and even then his trademark bass voice, and that the poetry he wrote for the magazine Parker founded was mature and fully formed: "I am rather proud to have been his first publisher." In contrast to the excellent Line of Beauty, which takes place at the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Swimming Pool Library is set in the early 1980s at which time it was apparently still possible to have daily unprotected sex with strangers with no adverse physical health effects other than the occasional beating by right-wing skinheads. Not as fun as it sounds if this book is anything to go by. and a sprinkling of those dotty types with monocles and panama hats who seem to exist for ever is some fantastic Bloomsbury of their own." Hard though Hollinghurst tries to hide in public, he drops in clues about himself throughout his novels. He even appears in person at the end of The Spell, "a sympathetic-looking man with short grey hair and a darker goatee", spotted by Alex when he goes cruising on Hampstead Heath. Another character in The Spell, an unappealing antique dealer called George, is said to have "a delight in artifice and a mania for honesty". The same might be said for Hollinghurst.to me, the self-relegation of most gay novels between these two categories can be annoying, but i suppose understandable. gays have to come out of the closet and so this intense experience is perfectly paired with the classic coming-of-age tale's structure. and gays are also often rejected by straight society, so why not rejoice in the telling of tales that in turn reject that straight world, that rolls its eyes at it, that have narratives that seem to posit that straights are the actual minority? Swimming-Pool falls squarely within that second category. Eliot has the “tremor of wit” Hollinghurst has to experience to really get into a writer; “immensely serious” though she is, “she’s tremendously witty and passionate and often terribly funny as well, although she can bang on a bit”. But then, as he says of himself, he likes to go on a bit too. The theme is emphasised and its general applicability is tested by passages in the novel which deal with the work of the generation of artists who did their work in the closeted pre-Wolfenden climate. If the idea of ‘homosexual writing’ is useful, it probably applies best to the period when homosexuality was criminal, and hence when the fictional treatment of same-sex love had to be implicit, indirect, deflected, latent. Hollinghurst’s unpublished M. Litt thesis, which I stumbled across as a graduate student, made a forceful case for this idea as applied to the work of Firbank, Hartley and Forster. His novel takes up the idea in asides: ‘It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it,’ Will remarks to a boyfriend reading The Go-Between, ‘the unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart.’ The most extended and moving treatment of the theme comes with Will’s visit to the opera in the company of his grandfather: the opera is Britten’s Billy Budd. Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. This facility is part of a unique collection of community and elite facilities governed by MCRactive, a not for profit organisation established and overseen by Manchester City Council. It is operated by Better under the MCRactive brand. Aberdeen City Council said: “The council is facing significant financial pressures in 2023/24 and is having to reduce its spending in a number of areas.

Stand alone changing rooms for users of the fitness suite, group exercise classes and sports hall activities. Between the new leisure centre and new library are five commercial units. Currently empty, these units are set to be filled with new businesses later in the year. WalesOnline understands the new Cadno Lounge restaurant is set to fill one - you can read more about the new restaurant here - while another unit will be filled by a bilingual childcare company. Further information about businesses in the other units is expected to come later in the year.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. An Introduction. [1976]. New York: Vintage, 1990. Beautifully welds the standard conventions of fiction to a tale of modern transgressions.It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complexities with a camp-fired wit and of truths with a fiction's solid grace' - The New York Times Book Review And what about now? “The distinctive purpose of gay writing, its political purpose or its novelty or its urgency have gone, and the gay world, as it changes, is perhaps not so stimulating to a fiction writer like me,” he says – although he’s careful to make clear he’s talking about his own writing rather than issuing blanket statements. “It doesn’t mean it can’t be written about.” there was one thing that consistently amused me, in a good way: the effete and fatuous queen of a lead character is also a rough, tough top. i like that! it is always interesting when expectations and stereotypes are subverted. sadly, those instances are the only examples of any kind of subversiveness. Rupert has been told to watch out for Arthur; he reports that he has seen him with his brother Harold.

It was a place I loved, a gloomy and functional underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality. Boys, from the age of seventeen, could go there to work on their bodies in the stagnant, aphrodisiac air of the weights room. As you got older, it grew dearer, but quite a few men of advanced years, members since youth and displaying the drooping relics of toned-up pectorals, still paid the price and tottered in to cast an appreciative eye at the showering youngsters.”Will gets a telephone call from James; he has been arrested whilst seeking sex. This is ironic since James's sex-life is non-eventful compared to Will's. It appears to be a case of police-entrapment, with an undercover officer soliciting sex from homosexual men.