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“... those poems that will find many readers from those that will find only few. At the risk of echoing Kingsley Amis (whom Trotter, in general very tolerant, justly pillories at one point), ‘a useful rough rule says’ that poems of pathos will find readers, poems of anti-pathos won’t. Geoffrey Hill’s fine ‘Mystery of the Charity of Charles ...”

“... university sponsorship scheme which gives us the Westland Chair of Anglo-American Relations, the Kingsley Amis Chair of Women’s Studies and the Durex Chair of French Letters. There is descriptive humour – the TV company’s board lunch, for instance: ‘the board members, in their big-prowed business suits, all of them old-looking, even when they ...”

“... heard of, and with feelings to be hurt, reputations to be damaged, libel actions to be won. Even Kingsley Amis waited for his memoirs until he has outlived most of his enemies. Only John Osborne has progressed to vol two without losing steam or bile: he seems to have patented a unique bite that is able to inject a poison, a sort of literary curare, that ...”

“... on television?) John Braine had ‘a perpetual look of being out of condition’, according to Sir Kingsley Amis, always the acme of fitness. Some of the liveliest tributes come at second hand. John Lehmann had eyes ‘like forget-me-nots within a skull’, says David Hughes, quoting William Plomer; Hermione Gingold’s voice was ‘like powdered glass in ...”

“... context, he was ‘not at all an Angry Young Man’. Those who were, the ‘fans of the novels of Kingsley Amis’ who went ‘marching in favour of nuclear disarmament’, seem to puzzle him. It is in the account he gives of his somewhat zigzag rise to stardom that Strong becomes impressive, the brazen self-promotion intercut with sudden flashes of ...”

“... war memoirs of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose ...”

“... notably members of the group shortly to be christened ‘the Movement’, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis among them. Frank had once told me Wain helped give him an entrée into broadcasting, perhaps introducing him to the long-serving Third Programme producer, Donald Carne-Ross, and although such casual reminiscences are prone to elide important ...”

“... shorts (‘for which she is perhaps getting a shade too grown-up’). Powell speculates about Kingsley Amis’s mental health around the time of the publication of the latter’s Memoirs, which upset him by repeating ‘my remark about Auden, which was clearly not to be repeated in a book’ (the remark in question was, on news of the poet’s ...”

“... most paradoxical and revealing habits of pseudonymy, that of the openly duplicitous author. When Kingsley Amis continued the Bond series in 1968 with Colonel Sun, there was no secret made about the fact. Nonetheless Amis wrote under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham’. Presumably this indicates some sort of functional ...”

“... decanter. You used to be able to tell, with some authors, when the stimulant had kicked in. Kingsley Amis could gauge the intake of Paul Scott page by page – a stroke of magnificent intuition which is confirmed by the Spurting biography, incidentally; and the same holds with writers like Koestler and Orwell, depending on whether or not they had a ...”

“... herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom ...”

“... suddenly discovered him. Empire of the Sun was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – making Martin Amis feel ‘as if the street drug-pusher had been made chairman of DuPont pharmaceuticals’ – and sold more than all Ballard’s previous books put together, even before it was turned into an Oscar-nominated film by Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. His ...”

“... To rate his achievement at its least, Martin Amis has been for upwards of 25 years the By Appointment purveyor of classic sentences to his generation. In Money (1984) he achieved something that was as much of a breakthrough for our insular literature as Bellow’s had been in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) for American writing, a manner electric, impure and unimpressed, except sometimes by itself, mixing refracted slang with swaggeringly artificial cadence ...”

“... of English literature’. Unlike those of his contemporaries whom he most envies (John Wain, Kingsley Amis), Bergonzi never managed to break out of the institution. As he admits, it was too comfortable. In the last thirty years he has taught at Manchester, then Warwick University, where he is now professor. True to his Morleyish origins, Bergonzi ...”

“... Powell himself as a writer. Though he deals competently with some poets (Betjeman and Roy Fuller, Kingsley Amis and Larkin), verse isn’t really his medium. Powell responds with most certainty to those literary forms most involved with time’s randomness, its ‘miscellaneousness’: the novel, the diary, the biography. Literature is for him, to a ...”