3,016 words
Part 1 of 2
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 …
The Prophet of Exhaustion
Being Yet Another Remembrance of
Bill Hopkins (1927–2012), Part 2
4,109 words
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, Read more …