Damn You, England: Collected Prose by John Osborne (Faber, £8.99 in UK)

This collection first appeared in 1994, some months before Osborne's death. Whether it was worth re-publication as a paperback is dubious: Osborne's reputation as a playwright belongs to the day before yesterday, and though he had some gifts as a polemicist, he emerges as an intellectual lightweight. The Angry Young Men of the 1950s were soon glad to join the British Establishment if and when they could, since most of their so-called anger was merely social resentment and frustrated ambition. Osborne scores some good points against theatre censorship, but that is a defunct controversy - 1960s permissiveness soon swamped the London stage - while his pieces of pseudo-Socialist rant merely expose him as an intellectual poseur.