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“... independence, or irresponsibility, is all the more striking because it was always there. Amis, Wain, even Conquest, were once conventionally of the left, as the thing to be: Larkin gave it all the cold shoulder. And they remained politicised in a way that he did not. He made fun of it all in his own way, as the late poem ‘Aubade’ makes a joke and ...”

“... Fiction in the Eighties’† – the very fiction which he supposes not to matter. Kingsley Amis is present there as a ‘joke figure of the right’ who once asserted that ‘more will mean worse’ in the field of educational provision, and whose novels have got worse in the course of his thirty-five years of production. Taylor likes ...”

“... It is unlikely that they will be read as avidly as the single-volume edition of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, which contains, as its editor Zachary Leader records, some eight hundred letters ‘from a trawl of several thousand’. Leader trawls, so that the reader can scud along. The Amis Letters made it into the ...”

“... suggest. She was a decade too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Amis-Barnes-Ishiguro as among the younger pillars of British fiction. She was two years too young to receive a full entry in Margaret Drabble’s 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, which featured only writers born before 1939. She wrote ...”

“... by contrast to the poems. The novel section, for instance, is either about the work of friends (Amis and Barnes) or American megalos: and Hamilton, interestingly, is an American specialist in these essays, never happier than when insolently ribbing the latest big-ticket imports. The poetry section is still weirder: Larkin one can understand, from ...”

“... And my air tickets.’ Odd, then, to keep returning to the book with benevolence and admiration. Kingsley Amis has admitted – with only a measure of self-parody – that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with ...”

“... that ‘the bookshelves are wet with South African tears’ and reminded me of an old novel by Kingsley Amis, in which a young seducer at a party takes a girl to the kitchen and makes her cry over South Africa. Another, Ezekiel Mphahlele, told me once that the only novel about South Africa he had enjoyed was William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe, a ...”

“... doesn’t even mention him in his new survey of post-war fiction. In the late Fifties and after, Kingsley Amis, Johns Wain and Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Co struck a new, demotic note. The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a ...”

“... so; and it may be that in taking up a novel readers would rather get away from all that. Kingsley Amis in the past could hardly have been accused of being PC, but in his latest there are impalpable traces of it, like mist beginning to thicken round a craggy old mountain. Although far from being one of his best, You Can’t Do Both is certainly ...”

“... Wyatt at the time (or at most with revisions in the same week). Wyatt was vain, but no fool. When Kingsley Amis showed that he knew as much as Wyatt himself about Mexican myths, the comment is characteristic in its mutually admiring embrace: ‘He knows a lot, Kingsley.’ Wyatt’s vanity insulated him against both ...”

“... Englishman convinced he is the decisive reincarnation of the Wandering Jew. It’s as if Sir Kingsley Amis had been converted to Judaism, given up the pub, and decided to justify his rebirth with a fulminating sermon on what chaps should be doing about Our Times. The Ruthenes have nothing to worry about. As rewritten for John Major’s ...”

“... came to us like summer “andhi”, / Sweeping the dungs and dirt, was M.K. Gandhi’). Kingsley Amis has famously remarked that in reading his son’s books he feels the lack of simple declarative sentences, along the lines of ‘having nothing more to say, they finished their drinks and left.’ He should like A Suitable Boy, which contains ...”

“... the Cox Report tellingly refers to as the ‘secretarial’ skills of writing, and that one was Kingsley Amis. I’m slightly embarrassed about the other thing I learned. This was that there is tremendous pleasure to be had from finding and drawing attention to the faults of others. I can barely resist marking printers’ errors even in published ...”

“... The novel is far too intelligent to take refuge in the self-protective attitudes with which Kingsley Amis and his friends guarded themselves by means of systematic derision from similar sorts of situation. No clowning around, no references to Bastards’ HQ and the like. For most young combatants the war became a real thing, requiring abnegation of ...”

“... of the ‘real’ historical world that it offers walk-on parts to actual persons, including Kingsley Amis, E.M. Forster, and the organiser of the 1980 Post-Impressionist exhibition. Still Life is nothing if not a capacious book, and whatever one makes of the Cambridge episodes, Byatt’s touch is marvellously sure when she comes to the less ...”