Fiction captures the forces that led to Brexit

Alan Hollinghurst (pictured) has a knack for mining the micro-moment. His outsider heroes are attuned to slight shifts in atmosphere. The young, gay intellectual in “The Line of Beauty”, which won the Booker prize in 2004, observes how Margaret Thatcher smiles “with a certain animal quickness”. An ageing antiquarian in “The Stranger’s Child” (2011) notes the way an Oxford don speaks with “snobbish reserve she hadn’t wholly wanted to disown”.