In 2004 Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. The book's reconstruction of London life in the 1980s focuses on the household of an ambitious Conservative politician. On the morning of the 1987 General Election, his dissident daughter and lodger discuss the effects of the last eight years of Conservative government. They conclude on this note:

Catherine is psychologically unstable, and the drizzle has perhaps come out in sympathy with her. She means that the decade's end is still not in sight; that the world it has announced seems without end; that she can see little prospect of the downfall of the father she resents, and the views and interests he represents. But the line suggests a slyer significance too. Looking back from seventeen years later, Hollinghurst is playing with hindsight. In one sense he gently mocks and frames the feeling that the 1980s would last for ever, from a moment when they are long gone. In another, he leaves the post-millennial reader to wonder if they have ever ended. Readers may reflect that the world around them is the product of the 1980s, or at least that it shows profound continuities with that decade. They may also feel that the very act of writing this novel, and its critical and public success, are signs of an inability fully to leave the 1980s behind, or leave them alone.