WHEN THE SECRET Author first wandered impressionably along Grub Street, the world was full of literary groupings. He was too young to remember the Movement (early 1950s) or the Angry Young Men (later 1950s), and the Sixties Experimentalists (Ann Quin, Alan Burns, B.S. Johnson) which by this time rated only the odd disapproving footnote in quasi-academic symposia.
On the other hand, he is old enough to recall the Dirty Realists, coaxed into life by a 1983 Granta anthology, and to smile over the, edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, 2000) were pretty much never heard of again.
