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By the end of the night, he’s had a drinking match with a sailor, vomited over a couple of OAPs, fallen headfirst down the stairs, and ended up in bed with someone else’s wife. This is how Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, introduces us to our hard-drinking, gobshite protagonist. This has been corrected.It’s post-war Nottingham and 22-year-old Arthur Seaton is down the local, The White Horse, where you’ll find him most weekends. The above review of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning said the book's main character, Arthur, lives in the rowdy bosom of his extended Leicestershire family. This article was amended on Saturday October 25 2008.It's also a powerful story of political awakening. This was the book that made "working class" pursuits beautiful. But Sillitoe's writing, with its sharp tang of cold mornings and warm pubs, has a cumulative lyricism which makes you feel Arthur's pangs as achingly as he does. Modern readers are unlikely to be shocked by his unsentimental affair with the married sisters Brenda and Winnie. Arthur - a bright, cocky lathe-worker given to fighting, fucking and fishing first, meditating on the system that keeps him in his place second - lives wholly in the rowdy bosom of his extended Nottinghamshire family.

Unlike Osborne and fellow "angries", Sillitoe doesn't even pay the establishment the compliment of dramatising its decline.

But then it doesn't need to: Sillitoe's account of the rebellious young factory-fodder hero Arthur Seaton was timely when first published (four years after the London premiere of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger) it is timeless now. H arper's fiftieth anniversary edition of Sillitoe's working-class classic doesn't add much value in terms of new editorial apparatus.