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“... in like whippets’ ‘for fearsome thrashes’ and ‘noholds barred’ – phrases from a single Kingsley Amis poem – and the vocabulary which describes them is notable for rapidity and violence: the penis is ‘rammed’, ‘shot’, ‘shoved’, ‘thrust’, and even in one case ‘posted’ into the vaginal slot. Boasting is compulsory, whether ...”

“... Can you even imagine the history of the cinema without Wenders?’ ‘No, I can’t,’ said Kingsley, truthfully. ‘I mean, someone’s got to sell the Coke and the popcorn.’ The most elaborate of these numbers concerns an article edited by Terry for a film journal. The piece is a rambling speech by a nonentity from the British film business, to ...”

“... Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities. It was good advice – and not only because they brought her solid sales and secured her popularity. The material of the chronicles seems like Howard’s natural and ...”

“... of famous alumni has contributed. Guardian readers have now been told that Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis called their Old English texts ‘ape’s bum-fodder’. But if these readers get no further than the preface to the Companion, they will see what another Oxford wit, W.H. Auden, said of the same material: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I ...”

“... halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware of always being ...”

“... it? Will he do himself justice? Sotto voice, will he let us down? It’s not just because, like Kingsley Amis, he turns his hand to so many genres. True, Fahrenheit 451 seemed to prove that Science Fiction was outside his range: but there may have been personal strains on Truffaut then – including that of filming in England, with uneasy backing and a ...”

“... that James Jones served him better than did Lillian Hellman ‘Americans as a whole,’ suggests Kingsley Amis in his recent Memoirs, do not really care for works of art, for works of fiction with all their subtleties, doubts and surprises: ‘they like the generalisations that can be drawn from them or put into them, the messages, the bits of uplift or ...”

“... Lodge wrote a brilliant essay, called ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis’, republished in his collection Language of Fiction (1966). All right, this essay said, so no one with any sense ever pretended that Lucky Jim was a work of art in the way that Ulysses is, or something by Virginia Woolf, but that in itself is not to say ...”

“... overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays ...”

“... and therefore irreverent. And it is certainly to be heard at times in Browning, as in Charles Kingsley, where Gerard Manley Hopkins heard it and characterised it unforgivingly but vividly when he envisaged a man starting up from the breakfast table, his mouth full of bacon and eggs, declaring that he will stand no damn’d nonsense.’ Does it ...”

“... extent a follower, who has also taken part in studies of the Movement group of poets – Wain, Amis, Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings and others – with which Larkin was originally associated. He has made skilful use of background material and unpublished material. Barbara Everett in her essay saw Larkin from a new angle. Andrew Motion emphasises still ...”

“... a consequence, his poems get shorter and shorter: ‘It looks as if meaning is running out.’ If Kingsley Amis had written this, we would be meant to understand that the man was learning sense as he grew older – kicking the bullshit habit. Enright seems to think so too: but he’s less sure. And so the poem ends neither forcefully nor with rich ...”

“... Thames in an idyllic setting but where the architecture ran to the kind of bungalow celebrated by Kingsley Amis in The Riverside Villa Murder. Deputed to propose the couple’s health, Huw looked around perplexedly and said something about this ‘funny little house’ in which X and Y had chosen to settle. In much the same way he could be an ...”

“... Both novels’ titles thus have a faint air of Soho about them; the first, Jill, is reported by Kingsley Amis to have been found located next to High-Heeled Yvonne, on a shelf of such works. With some justification, for the fantasies about Jill Bradley at her school Willow Gables do come close to what Booth calls ‘an unusual kind of ...”

“... as well as unscripted conversations about new novels and the like. I have a distinct memory of Kingsley Amis, also a regular on these occasions, leering over even the most far-fetched double-entendre that came up as we chuntered on. The point of this reminiscing is that there are many different routes from the academy to the magazine, and in those ...”