1,397 words
Surely, Ian Fleming’s final book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is also his finest work of fiction. Published 54 years ago this month, shortly after Fleming’s death, it is visibly superior to the James Bond books in so many ways.
For one thing, it has pictures. Fleming and his editors struggled long and hard to select the right illustrator. The drawings by the illustrator who was eventually selected, John Burningham, are note-perfect and meld perfectly with the text. (more…)
Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Gravedigger, 1895–1900
Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Gravedigger, 1895–1900
8,647 words
Editor’s Note:
Because of the warm response to Bill Hopkins’ Angry Young Man manifesto, “Ways Without a Precedent,” we are reprinting one of its companion pieces, Stuart Holroyd’s, “A Sense of Crisis,” also from Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957), 181–202. For some background, see Jonathan Bowden’s “Bill Hopkins and the Angry Young Men.”
7,411 words
Editor’s Note:
One of the aims of the North American New Right is to promote a revival of the Right-wing artistic and literary subculture that gave us such 20th-century giants as D. H. Lawrence, Gabriele D’Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, Knut Hamsun, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Williamson, Roy Campbell, and H. P. Lovecraft (all profiled in Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right). (more…)
Bill Hopkins
4,109 words
Part 2 of 2
Bill Hopkins
3. “The corrupt vigour of fascism.”
In early 1958, Time magazine ran a humorous squib titled “Sloane Square Stomp.”[9] It told how Colin Wilson (and presumably Bill) had attended a premiere of their friend Stuart Holroyd’s new play at the Royal Court Theatre. Bill and Colin’s onetime friend Christopher Logue stood up in the stalls with Kenneth Tynan, denouncing Holroyd and Wilson as fascists. During the interval, this led to a shoving match in a nearby bar. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, (more…)
Hopkins, around the time of Declaration and The Divine and the Decay (1957).
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Part 1 of 2
Hopkins, around the time of Declaration and The Divine and the Decay (1957).
(Told in the discursive spirit, if not quite the style, of Jonathan Bowden.)
“The evidence of exhaustion stares out from the columns of the daily newspapers. The references to ‘Angry Young Men’ for example, record a general astonishment at the vigour of simply being angry. Another instance is the hero-worship of the late James Dean, who posthumously remains as the embodiment of Youth’s violent rebuttal of a society grown pointless. That the rejection is equally pointless does not appear to matter; the sincerity redeems it.”
— Bill Hopkins, “Ways Without a Precedent,” in Declaration, 1957 (more…)
4,572 words
Isabel Colegate
The Blackmailer
Richmond, Va.: Valancourt, 2014
“If you want to call it God, the divine, the energy in all things, the force that created the universe, nature, whatever you call it, I believe it’s fury not love.” — Jonathan Bowden
“What we feel for each other is really a passion for power,” said Judith. “We want to destroy each other by making the other fall in love with us.” — Isabel Colegate, The Blackmailer (more…)
