The book is closely associated with the angry young men movement, and the essays are presented as "credos" or manifesto of the writers.

[7] Held elaborated: The critics have almost exclusively stressed the nihilism of these 'angry young men,' often using the label in an attempt to ridicule them, and in doing so have missed the point.

[7]Leslie A. Fiedler wrote in the Saturday Review that the writers were introduced as "brilliant and iconoclastic" on the jacket of the book, but thought that none of them "strikes one as really 'brilliant' (Tynan is funny enough by fits and starts and Osborne vigorously direct, but the rest are merely earnest and opaque), while their 'iconoclasm' consists of nothing more shocking than complaints against bureaucracy, the monarchy, and H-bomb tests, eked out with attacks on each other.

[8] Fiedler continued: Despite Mr. Osborne's protest that he is not the protagonist of Look Back in Anger and the desperate plea of all the accused that they are not Amis's Lucky Jim, it is evident that they write the same dialogue for themselves as for their characters.

But even the Angries, when they leave their lovely scorn and speak affirmatively, sound like all the other contributors, merge into the general middlebrow revolt against shrillness and despair.