In the annals of British literature and the British theater, the 1950s have gone down as the era of the Angry Young Men -- of a change in the cultural climate signaled above all by Kingsley Amis's novel "Lucky Jim" (1954) and John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger" (1956). The phrase "Angry Young Men" itself was devised by a theater publicist at the time, and in a rough fashion it indicates what the fuss was about: a scornful rejection of Establishment values, a truculent individualism. But it was never more than a loose journalistic label, and over the years it has lost most of such resonance as it once had.

David...