Alan Hollinghurst spoke through the medium of his new book at The Old Market.

This novel approach to a literary talk allowed much more than a glimpse of character and story; it demonstrated his wonderful, gravelly voice, showed off an unexpected gift for comedy and put me in mind of Charles Dickens, whose public readings of his own books were almost assuccessful as the stories themselves.

“Actor” must now be added to the list of Hollinghurst’s achievements as lecturer, scholar, editor and poet, even if this new talent obscured our prurient desire to guess how much of the author is contained in each character.

Alan Hollinghurst sprang into the public eye with The Line Of Beauty, the startling culmination to a series of four novels which explored the gay scene in England over a 20-year period and won him the Booker Prize in 2004.

His new novel The Stranger’s Child keeps us in the familiar Hollinghurst territory of looking through a window at a world richer and stranger than his own, but with a new emphasis on the difficulty of precisely categorising human behaviour and identity in all its forms.

This might be an exact definition of an adult author, as opposed to an author who writes adult books.