Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the elite while desperate to be one of them. He has just graduated from Oxford with a first in English literature, and finds himself in the private library of Lord Kessler for a glittering moment of mid-bourgeois insecurity. Feeling “disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and aesthetic prejudice” Nick muses on his literary horizons: “Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten.”
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