Alan Brownjohn

The Rise of the Ordinary Bloke

The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries

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Oxford University Press 336pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

The launch of ‘The Movement’, with a ‘leading literary article’ in The Spectator in October 1954 and the subsequent publication of two Movement anthologies, Robert Conquest’s New Lines and D J Enright’s Poets of the 1950s, was a highly successful exercise in publicity. The Spectator‘s support put several promising young poets on the map, and its articles promoting them certainly boosted circulation when it was lagging behind the left-wing New Statesman, and feeling the draught from rivals like the liberal Time and Tide and the independent right-wing Truth (where Alan Brien and Bernard Levin were rising stars). But there was much more to it than that.

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