This book is vital for anyone studying the cultural environment of postwar Britain and the rise of a generation of writers, filmmakers, and critics once termed as Angry Young Men. In fact, as their later careers proved, it was a disparate group of people with varied responses to the specific political and cultural situation they found in the United Kingdom in the years immediately after the Second World War and on into the 1950s. Chapters include contributions from: Colin Wilson, John Osborne, John Wain, Kenneth Tynan, Bill Hopkins, Lindsay Anderson, Stuart Holroyd and, at least one decidedly much calmer woman, Doris Lessing. ( )