ABSTRACT
As I write this, it is December 1989. Ten years ago, the Thatcher government (I won’t say ‘regime’) installed itself, and if-as John O’Connor remarks in his new book on Raymond Williams-‘the crisis of socialism in Britain did not come in one day’,1 1979 still seems, in retrospect, a watershed in the post-war political history of the UK. The force of this proposition is even more apparent when one considers that thirty years to this month, New Left Review was launched and, with it, the journal of a generation-not, however, the first but the second generation (not, in other words, the Old but the New Left). In Williams’s second novel, Second Generation (1964), Peter Owen represents this new movement, ‘a whole younger generation of British cultural theorists’ who were emerging in their own right [left?] even as Williams wrote his novel, though, ironically enough, it is Peter’s mother, Kate, whose Francophilia ‘anticipates the structuralist “turn”’ and ‘heady blend of Louis Althusser and Jean-Luc Godard’ (p. 5) that would characterize this generation.
