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Divorce me

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 17 December 1981

Love, Sex, Marriage and Divorce 
by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
Cape, 384 pp., £8.50, November 1981, 0 224 01602 4
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... have worried about how and how often they both come.’ (In this context it seems we must praise Kingsley Amis, who has given us, in Jake’s Thing, our only song of impotence and experience.) Gathorne-Hardy isn’t sure whether sex is a symptom or a cause of domestic unrest: ‘sex is central but also extremely elusive.’ At the end of his ...

Landlocked

Lorna Sage: Henry Green, 25 January 2001

Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green 
by Jeremy Treglown.
Faber, 340 pp., £25, September 2000, 0 571 16898 1
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... celebrate. Indeed, it’s often the juiciest biographical subjects, Vita Sackville-West, say, or Kingsley Amis, who anticipate the process, and turn themselves into caricatures and stereotypes in life. There’s a touch of this about Green’s long years of decline, when he drank himself silly, and retreated into an especially British style of ...

Whisky out of Teacups

Stefan Collini: David Lodge, 19 February 2015

Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir, 1935-75 
by David Lodge.
Harvill Secker, 488 pp., £25, January 2015, 978 1 84655 950 1
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Lives in Writing: Essays 
by David Lodge.
Vintage, 262 pp., £10.99, January 2015, 978 0 09 958776 7
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... of all his work. When one thinks of the novelists who influenced him most, it is Greene and Kingsley Amis who come to mind. He has written more than once about Amis, emphasising his range as well as his comic invention, but also the importance of the Movement’s freedom from traditional metropolitan class ...

Flaubert at Two Hundred

Julian Barnes: Flaubert, the Parrot and Me, 16 December 2021

... the book and burn them all.A more phlegmatic response to the Famous First Book dilemma was that of Kingsley Amis, who in later years was asked if Lucky Jim hadn’t been a bit of an albatross around his neck. ‘It’s better than having no albatross at all,’ he replied.Another Thing Kingsley Amis Said,this time ...

Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... need editing. He once told me that the cleanest copy he had ever received were the regular reviews Kingsley Amis used to write for him at the New Statesman – ‘never a mark on them’.Kingsley Amis might not be a writer people immediately think of in relation to Karl, but Karl’s reach across the literary ...

Anna of All the Russias

John Bayley, 24 January 1991

Selected Poems 
by Anna Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
Harvill, 173 pp., £5.95, November 1989, 0 00 271041 2
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The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova 
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder.
Zephyr, 1635 pp., £85, October 1990, 0 939010 13 5
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The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Bella Akhmadulina.
Boyars, 171 pp., £9.95, January 1991, 0 7145 2924 9
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... the world’. She found her voice, as Larkin may have found his through reading Hardy and knowing Kingsley Amis, and when Gumilev returned he was deeply impressed by what she had written. She had become a better poet than he, and though their marriage was ill-assorted and unhappy, and was to end in divorce during the war, there is no evidence that it ...

The Biographer’s Story

Jonathan Coe, 8 September 1994

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers 
by Roger Lewis.
Century, 817 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 7126 3801 6
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... into his own. Much as we might deplore his egocentricity, his male chauvinism, his hero-worship of Kingsley Amis, his inexplicable assumption that we are thirsting to learn his opinion about the films of Stanley Kubrick or Ernest Borgnine or Lionel Jeffries, it’s still impossible not to admire the manic energy which he has brought to his material. There ...

Porcupined

John Bayley, 22 June 1989

The Essential Wyndham Lewis 
edited by Julian Symons.
Deutsch, 380 pp., £17.95, April 1989, 0 233 98376 7
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... powerful underground influence on the style of modern fiction, on Angus Wilson and probably Kingsley Amis too: and on Lewis’s pioneer use of the grimace, developed in pursuit of his view that men are really machines pretending to be human. T.S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner thought very highly indeed of Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, published in 1955 ...

In Memoriam: V.S. Pritchett

John Bayley, 24 April 1997

... though seeming casual. If too casual they become jarringly offhand, sometimes a feature of the Kingsley Amis technique: ‘He noticed that the various lights of the High Street were reflected on the wet pavements in not too bad a way at all.’ The complex effect aimed at here – this ‘he’ has sensibility which the reader will recognise as that ...

History and Hats

D.A.N. Jones, 23 January 1986

The Lover 
by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray.
Collins, 123 pp., £7.95, November 1985, 0 00 222946 3
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Stones of the Wall 
by Dai Houying, translated by Frances Wood.
Joseph, 310 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 7181 2588 6
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White Noise 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 326 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 0 330 29109 2
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... In the past I rose and put others down, now I am falling.’ He is rather like a Kingsley Amis character, a slangy sort of blighter but witty and well-read: others describe him paradoxically (or dialectically?) as a figure of ‘sensitive insensitivity, elegant vulgarity, the keen insight of the ignorant, directionless retreat’. One ...

Uncertainties of the Poet

Nicolas Tredell, 25 June 1992

Kid 
by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 89 pp., £4.99, June 1992, 0 571 16607 5
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Feast Days 
by John Burnside.
Secker, 52 pp., £6, April 1992, 0 436 20103 8
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An African Elegy 
by Ben Okri.
Cape, 84 pp., £4.99, March 1992, 9780224030069
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Memorabilia 
by Colin Falck.
Taxus, 77 pp., £5.95, March 1992, 1 873012 23 3
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Serious Concerns 
by Wendy Cope.
Faber, 87 pp., £12.99, March 1992, 9780571166589
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... to a quoted review comment which damns with faint praise. The bestsellerdom which Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis achieved has put the spotlight on Cope’s work in such a way as to heighten the question of her poetic identity. Her poems can be enjoyed, consumed instantly, like bananas; but their obvious accomplishment, in terms of her handling of rhythm ...

Not Quite Nasty

Colin Burrow: Anthony Burgess, 9 February 2006

The Real Life of Anthony Burgess 
by Andrew Biswell.
Picador, 434 pp., £20, November 2005, 0 330 48170 3
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... It’s not quite a matter of class or tone or age, though it’s partly that. Larkin and Amis, born five years after him, make it easy for bien pensant readers to whip themselves into a froth of self-righteous horror because they are so much manipulators of indignation, sorrow and revulsion, and they took a positive delight in being ...

People and Martians

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 24 January 2019

The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties 
by Robert Conquest.
Bodley Head, 576 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 84792 568 8
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The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine 
by Robert Conquest.
Bodley Head, 412 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 84792 567 1
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... life without ‘poetic’ dressing-up. His friends and collaborators in this endeavour were Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and the three of them shared both a cheeky undergraduate misogyny, manifest in Conquest and Amis’s spoof, The Egyptologists, and a liking for pornography memorably documented in Andrew ...

Diary

Patrick Wright: The Cult of Tyneham, 24 November 1988

... events’, happily consigning the rest to the obscurity of their own ‘private emotions’. Kingsley Amis saw signs of literary philistinism in Mr Baker’s willingness to cut so many full poems down to snippets. But from Tyneham, these apparently ruinous cuts look valiant. They become symbolic of the price that must be paid if neglected traditions ...

Ticket to Milford Haven

David Edgar: Shaw’s Surprises, 21 September 2006

Bernard Shaw: A Life 
by A.M. Gibbs.
Florida, 554 pp., £30.50, December 2005, 0 8130 2859 0
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... that many Western intellectuals – including such leading literary figures as George Orwell, Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch – were strongly attracted to Communism.’ Holroyd is exasperated by Shaw’s delusions and alarmed by where they take him: ‘Our question is not to kill or not to kill,’ he quotes Shaw as writing in 1932, ‘but how to ...

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