3,016 words
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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 Read more …
Perused with Pleasure in 2018
My Top 5 Books
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. Read more …