The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.
Illustrated portrait of Toby Fedden

A character in The Line of Beauty

Toby Fedden

Nick’s Oxford friend, early crush, and doorway into the Fedden family.

What they want

An independent adult life while retaining the ease and advantages of his family’s world.

The book

Cover of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
The Line of BeautyAlan Hollinghurst, 2004

Desire, beauty, class, and conditional acceptance inside wealthy 1980s Britain.

View the book

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Toby is Gerald and Rachel’s handsome upper-class son.

Nick’s friendship and unspoken attraction to him open the household door.

Toby enjoys family privilege without examining all of its contradictions.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • PolishedHis ease makes upper-class life seem natural.
  • Attractive to NickErotic and class desire overlap in Nick’s attention to him.
  • A doorwayHis friendship brings Nick into the family.
  • Less exposedHe moves through the collapse with more protection than Nick.

If you like The Line of Beauty

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Alan Hollinghurst

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Charles Bukowski

    Charles Bukowski

    American poet and novelist of Los Angeles rooming houses, racetracks and the post office, who quit his job to write when a publisher offered him a hundred dollars a month. He came to Paris once, in September 1978, drank his way through a live television book programme and walked off the set — and French television has been replaying it ever since.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Claude McKay

    Claude McKay

    Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Martha Gellhorn

    Martha Gellhorn

    War correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, and conflicts across five more decades; Hemingway's third wife, 1940–1945.

    View author