The Years of Anger
by Andy Croft
Routledge, £35

WORKING on that awkward wavelength between the historian and the novelist, the biographer must be fully at home with the events and impacts of the age of his or her subject and, at the same time and without the imaginative freedom of fiction, convey that subject’s personal life experiences, feelings and responses.

Andy Croft successfully meets those criteria in his biography of Randall Swingler, one of the many literary figures on the left during the 1930s airbrushed from public consciousness during the cold war and its aftermath.
 
Croft, who must know more about “the Auden generation” — who lived through a tragic period unfairly dubbed a “low dishonest decade” by the writer — than possibly anyone alive, is in an ideal position to rescue Swingler the man and the poet from anonymity.

Swingler, born in 1909 at the swan song of Edwardian Britain, was typical of that privileged, upper-class group of public school and Oxbridge-educated youngsters who found themselves alienated from their class background by the disastrous social climate after WWI and who were enthused by the Soviet example of a potentially new world order.