SOURCE: Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. “No Good Brave Causes? The Alienated Intellectual and the End of Empire.” Literature & History 14, no. 2 (autumn 1988): 194-206.

In the following essay, Cairns and Richards explore the issue of colonialism in Look Back in Anger.

‘Then, on 8 May 1956 came the revolution …’¹ With these words, John Russell Taylor, in his 1962 study of Look Back In Anger, confirmed the reception given to the play by, most notably, Kenneth Tynan which set the critical parameters within which much of the subsequent exegesis was to take place. While Osborne's own career has generated a response whose general tendency is best represented by the title of one article: ‘Whatever Happened to John Osborne?,’² Look Back In Anger continues to generate an interest which owes much to the view of Tynan, confirmed by Taylor, that while the play may be speaking for a minority ‘What matters … is the size...