[1]Bill Hopkins, photographed by Ida Kar, 1955
7,100 words
JB: Were you an angry young man?
BH: Very much. I think everybody was very angry and frustrated during the 1950s and from the end of the war onwards actually. The whole country was in a state of stagnation, everything was pointless and meaningless. It was as though someone had stuck a vast syringe into the arm of the nation and all the energy had been withdrawn from it. We were all in limbo. The whole country had come to a standstill in a way that’s very difficult for people who weren’t born then to recall. The war seemed pointless to all of us. There was no feeling that ‘we’d triumphed over evil’ at all. The evil was that England was bankrupt, lost, directionless, purposeless. The wrong people...
