Also read...

Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child" from which I cannot pull a quote, though it gives every appearance of containing faultless prose. If Sebastian and Charles in Brideshead Revisited made it to first base, George and Cecil certainly proceed to second, but it is hardly more explicit. Sexuality is chimerical here too, attraction mercurial, the flamboyant Cecil making a seedy, pederastic grope of George's 16-year-old sister while at the family home boning George in sylvan ecstasies. Cecil eventually marries Daphne, and promptly dies in the great war while George settles down with a plodding mannish lady academic. The plot hiccups and advances every fifteen or twenty years or so. It was compulsively readable if ultimately disappointing.

Also "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantell which, again was compelling but a disappointment. From Wolf Hall:

"He cannot lock us all up"
"He has prisons enough"
"For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods but God will prosper us. He can close teh booksellers, but there will still be books. They can have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.

and

on Anne:
She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say that you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee. Not like you Mary. One push backward and, good girl, here's fourpence.
Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt.