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“... or with the ludic excavations of Angela Carter. Or with Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez or Kingsley Amis. What now seems striking is how utterly beyond this Bainbridge was. If she is to be seen as part of any tradition it is one that is long-standing, wide-ranging, little considered. The wits. I would put her alongside Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie ...”

“... nothing if not ‘civilised’ but still slightly creepy and it might have come as a surprise to Kingsley Amis, in view of their intimate oath-larded letters to one another, that Larkin, disappointed of a visit, should promptly have complained about him (‘He is a wretched type’) to his mother.‘Fearsome and hard-driving’, Larkin senior is said ...”

“... tailored his letters to his correspondent, and that the undergraduate raillery between him and Kingsley Amis (which reads like a form of schoolboy obscenity) was perpetuated in adulthood to sustain the language of their intimate acquaintance at Oxford. The hundreds of letters to Monica in part confirm the tailoring: Larkin is candid and funny and ...”

“... by his polemic into thinking of him as a reactionary determined to take mentors such as Larkin and Amis au pied de la lettre and never to give vent to an obscure or pretentious line. In general, James’s poetry does not much resemble that of the poets he declares his allegiance to: his temperament is different from theirs. He is more a latterday ...”

“... deeply hostile to the Little Englandism of many of his peers, notably Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He wrote a book about Czeslaw Milosz, translated many poems from Polish and Russian. In his memoir, These the Companions, he describes what he improbably calls F.R. Leavis’s charm, but the hero of the book is the Californian critic Yvor ...”

“... what counts as ‘popular’. The ‘popular’ writers are people like Arnold Wesker, H.E. Bates, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. Needless to say, the idioms which the BBC, the newspapers and the ‘popular’ writers are free to indulge in are those which pass the cultural censorship which dictionary-makers themselves exercise. So there is no ...”

“... becomes pregnant and marries into a more modern set: her husband, a friend of Ken Tynan and Kingsley Amis, has to be indoctrinated into her mother’s religion by the time-honoured Father D’Arcy, S.J. There are many more names, but she is not really name-dropping, in the usual sense: she is ‘dreaming all the time of smart literary parties, full ...”

“... sooner if he’d been less of a curmudgeon and less at odds with a leftist intelligentsia (think Kingsley Amis and you get the idea). He kept insisting that Germans were victims as well as perpetrators during the Second World War, a position that became less contentious around the turn of the century, with the publication of Sebald’s On the Natural ...”

“... Early Earthapples’, published in Penguin Modern Poets 2 (which Porter shared with Kingsley Amis and Dom Moraes in 1962), is skilfully autobiographical. Its ‘eagerly unhappy’ protagonist may be Audenesque in his self-presentation as ‘The boy with something wrong reading a book’, but the setting among prep school boys ‘who made ...”

“... and with hindsight we can see the genres he is skirting. ‘Not quite a political dream,’ Kingsley Amis said, ‘nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a comic joke in the form of spy novel, but it is something of all three.’ Lethem adds that the book is ‘not quite a roman noir nor a simplistic religious allegory’, and thinks it is ‘much too ...”

“... associated with such books as Lucky Jim, Hurry on Down and even Room at the Top’ – novels by Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Braine, which appeared in 1954, 1953 and 1957 respectively. But Bradbury also tells us – he is writing in 1962 – that he finds this positioning ‘rather curious’, chiefly because of ‘the curious [again] ornateness ...”

“... between the decline of the classics and that of grammar. A short, bad-tempered article by Kingsley Amis complaining of the ignorance, misuse and misprision of language nowadays is cunningly placed just before a confessional piece by Christopher Ricks, describing how such linguistic ‘decline’ can on the contrary bring comfort and ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously ...”

“... to the mast in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.* Zachary Leader, formerly the biographer of Kingsley Amis, prudently avoided such horn toots of hubris in the amassing of his two-volume Life of Bellow, the authorised and definitive biography that groans with the graven heft of stone tablets. He doesn’t make this undertaking about him. As ...”

“... and memory. Dogs when they bark at you might perhaps be doing something like swearing: certainly Kingsley Amis, a writer not unacquainted with the palaeomammalian brain, used to imitate a dog barking ‘fuck off’. But human swearing is also a complex social activity, which often marks or tests or breaks social boundaries. When Eliza Doolittle says ...”