The wrong label that stuck

A young writer produced a brilliant novel that attacked religious fundamentalism, rubbished the press, found politics corrupt and the members of the British upper class shallow and boring. The date was 1930 when the 27-year-old Evelyn Waugh published Vile Bodies.

Sixteen years later Kingsley Amis read Brideshead Revisited at St John’s College, Oxford and sent quotations to Philip Larkin with a ‘burp’ printed after what he thought was every precious line. Although it has to be said that a burp after ‘made free of her narrow loins’ is justified, the incident shows how important it is, if you are struggling to find a new literary voice, to burp at the immediate past.

The journalists who wrote about the ‘Angry Young Men’, after John Osborne had presented them with a title, saw the writers of the Fifties as gritty North Country working-class boys, or the products of red-brick universities, who were resolutely left-wing and intent on changing society.