“... or another.’ There are times when anorexia functions in Lost for Words as schizophrenia does for Kingsley Amis in Stanley and the Women, countersubject outranking the subject, the ballast that almost sinks the ship. It’s at the moment when a literary sensibility seems confounded by reality, with Vanessa’s reflections on the vicious purity of her ...”

“... Doris Lessing, Raymond Williams, Anthony Burgess, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Kingsley Amis and the adamantine Murdoch. In 1979, the Public Lending Right was passed by Parliament (today, authors receive around 9.55p per loan, capped at £6,600 a year). Then Duffy dumped Brophy.Logic might have felt like a sturdy pedestal to ...”

“... I misread the cocked eyebrows and suppressed giggles. Things can’t be like this for Julian Amis and Kingsley McEwan. However, this time (page 147) I do not dispose of the current manuscript in the garbage, nor do I roll up my sleeves and just get on with it like a plucky little householder, mother and lady novelist ...”

“... enough but it makes literature a nastier world. 8 January. Reading Zachary Leader’s biography of Kingsley Amis, though not with much relish. She was ‘a good drinker’, Leader says of the Swansea original of Mrs Gruffydd-Williams, and while one feels this is very much an Amis-type judgment, it’s not one Leader ...”

“... a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and beginnings. Many powerful writers, in Karl’s estimation, could reveal a country source, a little Scotland or Ireland or Wales, running from a ...”

“... Then came the risky, occluded territory of sleep. Sinatra seems to have shared a pathology with Kingsley Amis: a fear of the shadows at the end of the night-time tunnel. What was hiding there he was so reluctant to explore?Sinatra had none of the nice-and-easy-does-it spirit of his pal Dean Martin. He was also deathly serious about his craft. That may ...”

“... Honeysuckle and the Bee’. Not everyone likes this extraordinary story. Both Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis have protested at its terse, incomprehensible oddity, and called it frankly bad. But most other admirers of Kipling, and indeed of good fiction in general, find it in its strange way consummate, haunting and powerful. But a powerful account of ...”

“... poem (‘Sibyl’), an affinity to comedy. Indeed, ‘well might’ is a comic counterpart to Kingsley Amis’s satirical shaking of the word ‘just’. Amis invoked Shirley:Only the actions of the justSmell sweet and blossom in their dust.And in doing so expressed his settled distrust:Which does the just about as ...”

“... the highest in the OECD. It is not the case that “more means worse.”’ So that’s what Kingsley Amis and the Black Paper critics were really on about: letting in the hoi polloi might endanger earnings differentials. The crassness of the thinking here hardly needs comment: it’s all right for you to be allowed to go to university – as long ...”

“... narrator, gazing out over millennial London, mimicked the verbal tics and fireworks of Martin Amis, we are now in country-pub Kingsley territory. But as Hugh delves into the mystery of his mother’s disappearance, remembering his malarial visions of her at his bedside, and investigating the local legend of the ‘Red ...”

“... of speakers have ‘permanently damaged the reputation of universities’. When he reports Kingsley Amis’s blunt warnings in the first Black Paper that ‘more has meant worse’ and that far too many students were being allowed to go to university, his only comment is that ‘Amis put the issue more starkly ...”

“... received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages ...”

“... by friends and acquaintances of the poet. Many of the contributors are writers themselves. Kingsley Amis’s reminiscences of a 40-year-friendship have an effortless interest which is met at more intensity in his own best novels; Gavin Ewart’s affectionate ode is almost ideally deft; Alan Bennett’s implacably wary set – piece (‘Why not ...”