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“... by Redgrove, Allison records Larkin’s experience of the collaborative process, as related to Kingsley Amis: ‘Each editor became more like himself as time went on – Dobrée more feather-brained and corrupt, MacNeice lazier and duller witted, and me more acutely critical and increasing in integrity.’ (In the recently published Letters to ...”

“... his being published by Gollancz, then Jonathan Cape and now Fourth Estate; his friendship with Kingsley Amis; or the quotes on the inside back flap describing him as ‘Britain’s number one living novelist’, ‘the most important contemporary British writer’ and a ‘national treasure’. He may not be a member of the establishment, quite, but ...”

“... If Carey at times seems unsure who exactly his readers are (do they like Thomas Mann or Kingsley Amis?) and who exactly his enemies are, if he swerves between easy and more difficult pleasures, and between aesthetics and politics, he is, in a sense, only re-enacting Modernism’s very anxieties – though this may be too much for Carey to ...”

“... including his friends. Choosing Will This Do? as his Sunday Telegraph Christmas book choice, Kingsley Amis wrote: ‘Despite the known dangers of mentioning this person, even favourably, I nominate Auberon Waugh’s volume of autobiography … It is not the most agreeable nor certainly the most edifying of reads, and now and then it portrays the ...”

“... the novel, and on novelists, has been incalculable. He has always been a writer’s writer. Only Kingsley Amis, I believe, has been able to resist his charm. But ironically the finest modern work to encompass and inhabit a comparable world is a short play – Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In it the Quixotification of Sancho and the ...”

“... Dundy writes in Life Itself! In the diaries he describes caning her for having a fling with Kingsley Amis, ‘one stroke for each letter of his name’, then ordering her to confess her punishment to another couple (like a dope, she did). And he didn’t halt at corporal punishment. During one of their apache dances, he laces into Dundy so hard ...”

“... notorious ‘Mrs Bathurst’ he says: ‘though the rambling narration has been denounced by both Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, the story is as precise as a Swiss watch. Everything fits, but the reader has to wind it up.’ I doubt if the metaphor is well chosen. Such a story is more like a Post-Impressionist painting, for which we have to get our eye ...”

“... wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be Larkin to Kingsley Amis, and it’s a nice sting in the tail that we can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s closest friends, sent during a stay in ...”

“... Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day Lewis, ‘less clever than Auden, less ebullient than MacNeice ... may well turn out to be more durably satisfying than either’. This was, perhaps, just coffin-smoothing on Amis’s ...”

“... had a predominantly middle to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a ...”

“... Since I am about to comment on other people’s published reactions to Martin Amis’s novel Other People, it seems right to state in summary form my own feelings on the main matters that divided the reviewers. I thought it a remarkable work, highly readable and enjoyable, not incomprehensible or unduly difficult ...”

“... remark for over thirty years until I bumped into it as an observation by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls. It may not have been the same remark, of course: but since Amis was Larkin’s close friend, and Larkin a great letter-writer, and since the words on the page served ...”

“... confidence in his aesthetic judgments (something that attracts him to his great friend Martin Amis is that Amis has no problem telling him what sorts of book he should like). But Hitchens has complete confidence in his political judgments, which are robust, intensely felt and invariably propped up by vast amounts of ...”

“... Withers, like Todd, was more interested in writers and artists than clothes: Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Bertrand Russell and Simone de Beauvoir all wrote for Vogue under her editorship and she ran features on Gore Vidal, Isherwood, Bacon, Freud and Matisse. She employed Elizabeth David to write on food. And she was a socialist. Her ...”

“... or another.’ There are times when anorexia functions in Lost for Words as schizophrenia does for Kingsley Amis in Stanley and the Women, countersubject outranking the subject, the ballast that almost sinks the ship. It’s at the moment when a literary sensibility seems confounded by reality, with Vanessa’s reflections on the vicious purity of her ...”