Snippets 2

Kingsley William Amis (1922-1995)
(One of the 'Angry Young Men' Amis was a working class only child smart enough to get a university education.)

However bright, the Lefty as defined by Amis was moved primarily not by ideas but by feelings and emotions. He or she typically started out as a young person who had an 'unfocussed dissatisfaction with the way things are', that is, with the way authority in the shape of employers or parents seemed to stand in the way his or her freedom just for the sake of being obstructive.
In stage two of the Lefty's development, the young man finds himself not getting on very far in a competitive world and when he asks himself why, he finds a blissfully satisfying answer. Which is that it's not his fault for being lazy or stupid or anything else - it's all the fault of the system that holds him back. So from now on the system must be opposed.
Amis knew all about his version of the Lefty from having been one himself.
...soon after his novel The Anti-Death League was published in 1966, Amis described its theme as being that 'what causes most unhappiness and feelings of revolt is the inescapable condition of human life...'
He had used to think, Amis went on, 'that human beings could be made significantly happier by transforming their outward lives'. Now he thought differently. 'Their real enemies are not
capitalism but death, not landlords but cancer, not warmingering but the power to kill people.'
p 281

In November it was the Observer's turn to be berated for implying that the Isralis had carried out the massacres of the Palestinians in Beirut and quoting two sources to back their case - 'Yassar Arafat and the PLO's man in New York.' The next year Amis invented a name for this kind of thinking: seditious neutrality'.
p 345
(from Kingsley Amis a Biography by Eric Jacobs)

Sport, as I have discovered, fosters international hostility and leads the audience, no doubt from boredom, to assault and do grevious bodily harm while watching it. The fact that audiences at the National Theatre rarely break bottles over one another's heads, and that Opera fans seldom knee one another in the groin during long intervals at Convent Garden, convinces me that the theatre is safer than sport. p 21 Clinging to the Wreckage by John Mortimer