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“... surprisingly, of the other type (and his intensely focused Patrimony is somewhere in the middle). Kingsley Amis’s riotous Memoirs are lifelike, too much so for some. Terence Kilmartin once said that the book was ‘fantastically idle’ – which was part of the point. In a sense, it’s logical for a novelist to choose this second course, since a ...”

“... sociological interest, even though Taylor often doesn’t much like them. At one extreme there is Kingsley Amis, whose novels are said to have ‘enormous importance’ and are discussed in great detail even though Taylor admits that they are not to his taste. At the other extreme, something called the ‘average post-war novel’ makes regular ...”

“... More did mean worse – although not quite in the way Kingsley Amis feared. He and his Black Paper colleagues misjudged what would happen to ‘standards’ after the expansionist Robbins Report. The British university product – the education of undergraduates and scholarly research – has never been better than it now is, nor its international reputation higher ...”

“... Fifty years later he’s still up in the treetops: he never touches the ground again. Martin Amis began a similar feat of heroic resolve in the 1970s, and whatever you make of his commitment to an all-consuming idea of style, you can’t say he makes things easy for himself up there. In his new book, his 25th, statements like ‘the doorbell rang’ or ...”

“... 1983.) An American professor of English literature, with a strong admiration for George Orwell and Kingsley Amis, Fussell uses his nation’s Handbook in their fierce, blustering way, to challenge the conceptions of trendy-left and radical-chic folk, explaining to them that a boy who tries to obey Scout Laws, whatever else he does, will not grow up like ...”

“... but didn’t seem particularly good at it. All of which reminds me of a distressing line in a Kingsley Amis poem: ‘Me first, Kingsley; I’m cleverest!’ Thus equipped, Jane leaves home. When she first encounters Ardu, he’s like a negative image of Apollo or Zeus: she can barely see him, the dominant figure ...”

“... of female instruction which were founded in the latter half of the 19th century. Charles Kingsley, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of English at Queen’s College, London, argued that the reading of English would help towards an understanding of the ‘English spirit’ and would therefore counteract the notion that ‘the minds of young women ...”

“... over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits ...”

“... parody of Yeats’s anthology piece, any more than Beckett’s Worstward Ho is a parody of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!. Brett has therefore come up with almost the only way of being calumniatingly unjust to Ezra Pound. And, even-handedly, to Pound’s impugners. J.B. Morton was often funny and acute, but his philistine squib against Pound,‘Another ...”

“... The last letter​ Philip Larkin wrote was to Kingsley Amis on 21 November 1985. He was too ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it ...”

“... depress me – Met Stetson and gave him an earful. Cope’s first collection, Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis, contains a good deal that is as inventively funny as this. Her habitual stance is the sly one, less modest than might appear at first sight, of marginal annotator, ruthlessly mocking literary pretentions and absurdities. Her creation of the ...”

“... how, say, a long vowel differs audibly from a short one. I was once at a lunch at which the late Kingsley Amis gave the table a hilarious and I’m sure exquisitely accurate resumé of the Great Vowel Shift in English, and how it would have sounded had it all taken place between courses, in roughly a minute and a half. That, I reflected at the time, is ...”

“... and there can have been but few occasions when the whole company of Angry Young Men was assembled. Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless ...”

“... Russian contact of what Syndics are and do in that university. But of course the great thing, as Kingsley Amis pointed out, is to sound as if you know some things well, and the rest will be taken on trust (except by readers who happen to have privileged information). For the rest, this novel (sometimes possibly a shade too expansive, as in the accounts ...”

“... the high tone of the poem. Larkin is obviously hurt in his next letter when he tells Monica that Kingsley Amis wasn’t interested in the poem, though he was ‘quite polite’ about it (he didn’t like the use of ‘blent’). In a letter written after hearing ‘Mr Bleaney’, with its complaints about rented rooms (‘Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt ...”