As a singer, Gene Pitney recorded Only Love Can Break a Heart and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

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In the section that opens the novel, it is 1913 and Cecil Valance is visiting the family house of his Cambridge chum, George Sawle.

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This is a big, spacious novel, and Hollinghurst uses the history of the Valance and Sawle families to effect a moving commentary on English decline.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers

Then there is John Ford, the great American director of such classic westerns as "Stagecoach" (1939), "The Searchers" (1956) and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962).

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Cecil Valance stays only three days at Two Acres, the Sawle family house on the edge of North London, but the house party becomes a piece of literary history, because it is here that Cecil writes a poem for Daphne, which memorializes the house and its garden.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers