  You can put your tongue away now, boy urlLink Puff piece in today's Grauniad concerning the love-in between Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith (Nick Hornby likes to watch, apparently). I've always wondered if, secretly, Alex Garland and Zadie Smith donate their sperm/eggs to create a new generation of uber-hip publishers' wet dreams -- somewhere in W1 there's a firm of graphic designers already working on the dust jacket imagery as I write this, while these precocious babies are awaiting intensive tuition of some description.
Anyhow, back to the plot... author Gordon Burn attempts to place all of this into a milieu of some description and is at pains to create literary parallels: "Clive James once famously responded to the criticism that he only ever seemed to recommend books written by his friends in the annual, pre-Christmas roundups with the reply that books by his friends were the only books he had time to read. He was mocked for what was taken to be a piece of bare-faced self-aggrandisement. But James was part of the circle that formed around the late Ian Hamilton, the poet, critic and editor of, first, the Review, and then the New Review in Soho in the 60s and 70s. The group included Al Alvarez, James Fenton, Craig Raine, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. And reading the festschrift that was published to celebrate Hamilton's 60th birthday four years ago, it was salutory to be reminded that it hadn't come into existence, fully-formed, as a cohesive, self-lubricating unit of smooth metropolitan movers and shakers. Barnes, for example, describes his humiliation at turning out in what the New Review lags referred to pointedly as his "literary London" suit (it was green velvet).
McEwan at the time was living in an attic room in South London. Along with the other regulars at the Pillars of Hercules pub next door to the NR offices in Greek Street they were carrying on a Grub Street tradition dating back to the clubs and coffee houses of Samuel Johnson's London, the salons of Paris and Bloomsbury, the Algonquin Round Table and the crash pads of the Beats.
But the set-up the New Review crowd most nearly emulated was Cyril Connolly and his "friends of promise" at Horizon, which was launched in 1939 on the eve of the second world war and persisted for a decade. " The urlLink Underground Literary Alliance won't be impressed, that's for sure. Update: the urlLink Bookslut herself is also not impressed. 
