I am in shock. I have just read two books that expose Britain’s teenagers as vicious, lawless, contemptuous of authority, alienated from family and society, fixated on drugs, drink, crime and lethal weapons, and wrapped up in a gang culture that leads nowhere except incarceration or an early grave. Yes, the youth of 1938, when Graham Greene wrote Brighton Rock, must have been a ghastly lot. Surpassed, perhaps, only by the young thugs of 1962, as portrayed in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange — though the author said that he based that novel’s most violent scene on a horrific attack...