Allan Massie

Writers and the Golden Age

I wasn’t listening carefully to the discussion on Radio 5 because I was mucking out the stable at the time. So I never learned who the speakers were. But the gist of the argument seemed to be why so much art – all art? – was left-wing. Were there, someone asked, any right-wing writers? A few novelists were tentatively proposed (Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell), but the consensus was that art was left-wing because it was, first of all, protest, and secondly (I think) a criticism of society and the way we live now.

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