Tag: The Divine and the Decay

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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…)

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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…)

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Albert Camus’ The Stranger had a powerful effect on me when I first read it at the age of 18. Recently I had cause to pick it up again when I re-read Bill Hopkins’ The Leap! (a.k.a. The Divine and the Decay) with the aim of writing an essay on it. Hopkins’ manner of constructing a plot out of seemingly trivial, tedious, and disconnected events that suddenly come together in an emotionally shattering climax — a climax that seems utterly surprising yet in hindsight utterly inevitable — brought to mind The Stranger.  (more…)

Bill Hopkins, 1928–2011

59:34 / 9,640 words

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Editor’s Note:

The following text is transcript by V. S. of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden given at the 7th New Right meeting in London on April 8, 2006 entitled “Bill Hopkins: An Anti-Humanist Life.” (more…)

Franz von Stuck, “The Spirit of Victory”

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Bill Hopkins was one of the “Angry Young Men” group of writers who emerged in the 1950s. He was the most prominent of the “Outsiders” trio amongst the “Angry Young Men”—a groupuscule which consisted of himself, Colin Wilson, and Stuart Holroyd.  (more…)

Bill Hopkins, photographed by Ida Kar, 1955

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JB: Were you an angry young man?

BH: Very much. I think everybody was very angry and frustrated during the 1950s and from the end of the war onwards actually. The whole country was in a state of stagnation, everything was pointless and meaningless. It was as though someone had stuck a vast syringe into the arm of the nation and all the energy had been withdrawn from it. We were all in limbo. (more…)

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We need to be reminded from time to time of the crucial problem that must be solved if our race is to survive, the Jews’ subversion and inversion of our morality that Nietzsche so clearly analysed in Zur Genealogie der Moral.[1] (more…)