From znet
In 1988, the English literary critic and novelist, D.J. Taylor wrote a seminal piece entitled 'When the Pen Sleeps'. He expanded this into a book 'A Vain Conceit', in which he wondered why the English novel so often denigrated into 'drawing room twitter' and why the great issues of the day were shunned by writers, unlike their counterparts in, say, Latin America, who felt a responsibility to take on politics: the great themes of justice and injustice, wealth and poverty, war and peace. The notion of the writer working in splendid isolation was absurd. Where, he asked, were the George Orwells, the Upton Sinclairs, the John Steinbecks of the modern age?Twelve years on, Taylor was asking the same question: where was the English Gore Vidal and John Gregory Dunne: 'intellectual heavyweights briskly at large in the political amphitheatre, while we end up with Lord [Jeffrey] Archer...'
In the post-modern, celebrity world of writing, prizes are alloted to those who compete for the emperor's threads; the politically unsafe need not apply. John Keanes, the chairman of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, once defended the absence of great contemporary political writers among the Orwell prize-winners not by lamenting the fact and asking why, but by attacking those who referred back to 'an imaginary golden past'. He wrote that those who 'hanker' after this illusory past fail to appreciate writers making sense of 'the collapse of the old left-right divide'.
