{weekend words}

Lord Kessler paid a moment’s wry respect to this bit of showing-off, but said, ‘Oh, Trollope’s good. He’s very good on money.’

‘Oh … yes …’ said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. ‘To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.’

‘You must know that one, though,’ said Lord Kessler.

‘No, this one is pretty good,’ Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion.

Alan Hollinghurst (2004)

The Line of Beauty