Books: Young men with literary attitude.

(From The Birmingham Post)

Byline: Simon Evans

Coming as a breath of foul air amidst the cosy conformity of post-war Britain, the Angry Young Men, a ragbag collection of literary misfits with little or nothing in common, were perhaps the first media-created artistic movement.

Lumped together under this catch-all title were the playwright John Osborne, bedsit philosopher Colin Wilson and epicurean novelist Kingsley Amis.

The writers John Wain, John Braine and a host of lesser lights made up the numbers of this short-lived pre-tabloid cult, described by Amis himself as 'a phantom creation of literary journalists'.

Humphrey Carpenter does an excellent job of pulling together the disparate strands of this fleeting cultural fad, although why he should choose to subtitle it 'a literary comedy' is rather …