Bill Hopkins (May 5, 1928–May 6, 2011) was a Welsh novelist and critic who made his living dealing in art and antiques. Associated with the so-called Angry Young Men literary group of the 1950s, Hopkins was a thinker of the Right, notable for his friendships with Colin Wilson and Jonathan Bowden. Over the years, Counter-Currents has published a number of pieces by and about Hopkins, and we would welcome more recollections of his life and influence as well as reprints and analyses of his writings. (more…)
Tag: Bill Hopkins
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The Leap!, the lone novel penned by Bill Hopkins, the man of mystery who was friend to both Jonathan Bowden and Colin Wilson, has just been brought back into print by Dunce Books! and is currently available through Underworld Amusements. The Leap! was also recently reviewed by Greg Johnson. (more…)
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Bill Hopkins (1928–2011) was a British Right-wing writer and intellectual who was associated in the 1950s with the so-called Angry Young Men, which was less a movement than a loose journalistic appellation for writers from mostly working- and middle-class backgrounds who were dubbed “angry” because of their disillusionment with post-Second World War British society. Some of the Angries hardly knew each other.
In 1957, Hopkins’ first novel, The Divine and the Decay, was published in in London by MacGibbon & Kee. (more…)
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Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, & Adrian Davies
Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-Right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. (more…)
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2,507 words
Jonathan Bowden (ed. by Greg Johnson)
The Cultured Thug
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2023Stylistically there are two kinds of Jonathan Bowden essay. There are the neat, trim, polished ones that clock in at 800 to 1,100 words, like a review in The Spectator. Then there are the luxuriant, digressive ones that are always rambling off onto weird, and often interesting, tangents. The difference between the two is that the latter kind usually come to us as transcripts of speeches from gatherings where Bowden had an hour or more to fill, and thus had good reason to pad out his thesis with amusing asides and intriguing anecdotes. (more…)
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Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies.
With a Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. (more…)
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I was using my Spectator-co-uk digital subscription to search for odds and ends in its wonky archive. What, I wondered, did the Speccy have to say about the Angry Young Men in the late 1950s? Better yet, what did they have on Colin Wilson and his friend, the ever-elusive Bill Hopkins?
Not an awful lot, as it turns out. (more…)
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1,659 words
Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies.
With a Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. (more…)
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August 21, 2015 Jonathan Bowden
“Божиите маймуни“ на Уиндъм Люис
English original here
Уиндъм Люис
The Apes of God“Божиите маймуни“ (Apes of God) се оказва една от най-унищожителните сатири публикувани на английски език от времето на Драйдън и Поуп насам. (more…)
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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…)
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4,109 words
Part 2 of 2
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…)
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3,016 words
Part 1 of 2
(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…)