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“... quite as she would have wished. At the Booker dinner, she has a pretty uninspiring time next to Kingsley Amis (who deserts her for ‘more important literary friends’ as soon as the food is through), and finishes the evening at the runners-up party at the Groucho Club – all too aware that ‘the most important party’, for the winner, is happening ...”

“... from English then.’ Still, there are other arguments on the side of the decadence party. Kingsley Amis contributes his elegant though not unfamiliar jeremiad on the loss and confusion arising from the habitual misuse of certain words: flaunt for flout, refute for deny, perpetrate for perpetuate, and so on. There is the notable case of ...”

“... George G. Ale). Through Pat Gale, a Swansea girl (whom Cowling would eventually marry), and Kingsley Amis, who taught at Peterhouse in the early 1960s, Cowling had links with the boozy set fictionalised in Amis’s The Old Devils (1986). These two South Londoners, Amis, whose ...”

“... keep a few Oxford friends – Bruce Montgomery (Edmund Crispin), Diana Gollancz and the dreadful Kingsley Amis – amused. Brunette’s work was read aloud to Montgomery and Gollancz after evenings at the pub, and its progress discussed in salacious detail in letters designed to persuade Amis that Brunette’s ...”

“... and delightfully muddled. This delight in messiness was not in fact confined to her art, as Martin Amis points out in a brief, reprinted piece: in the Murdoch-Bayley ménage, ‘even the soap is filthy,’ while odd shoes and socks lie about the house as if, in Bayley’s words, ‘deposited by a flash flood’. No wonder her most famous essay is entitled ...”

“... It’s this evenness of texture that is the basis for the charge that he writes too well. Martin Amis has described the effects created by Updike’s prose as being like cinematography – ‘rich, ravishing, and suspiciously frictionless’. The most memorable piece of Prac Crit performed on Updike comes from Mailer’s novel Tough guys don’t dance. ‘I ...”

“... The first million-selling paperback was Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters in 1956, while Kingsley Amis received £100 for Lucky Jim. There is a wonderful description by a friend of Virginia Woolf’s who arrived at her flat to find Woolf and Edith Sitwell, between whom relations were somewhat strained, sitting companionably together on the sofa ...”

“... that looms over oldness makes it repulsive to some people, morbidly attractive to others. Kingsley Amis, who was only 52 when he published Ending Up, his brilliant farce of old age in all its nuance, went at least halfway to meet it, developing from middle age onwards his own style of old devilry. The bad temper, the dislike of the young, the ...”

“... for improbable adventures. In Colonel Sun, his own imitation under the alias Robert Markham, Kingsley Amis showed that he understood this, but the knowledge only deprived him of his own powers while not giving him Fleming’s. The only memorable moment in the book has Bond, at the moment just before some disaster strikes, driving quietly along, with ...”

“... love to him for motives of sheer pleasure, produces smiles which the author cannot have intended. Kingsley Amis used to quote a novel by his friend John Braine (it sounded too good to be true and I never found it in Braine’s oeuvre) in which a woman says to the hero as they lie together, naked in the afternoon: ‘It isn’t bloody fair’ (or words to ...”

“... Charcot, Freud, Marcuse, Timothy Leary. At times, it can look like medical history as penned by Kingsley Amis, and I suspect it of a harmless, if dislikeable, anti-semitism, and of a definite hostility to the legacy of German Romanticism. Andrea Dworkin’s ludicrous Right-Wing Women confirms, I am afraid to say, that women do suffer from paranoia. It ...”

“... and watching everything get worse. Now he noted with upper-middle-class dismay the onset of what Kingsley Amis calls the modern ‘unchangeable crappiness’: the deterioration of the postal and telephone service, the decline of craftsmanship and the attendant rise of publicity, the vogue of strikes and slowdowns and quitting work early, confiscatory ...”

“... new recruits knock at the door. Conclusion: be wary of too much speed in welcoming new-comers. As Kingsley Amis said in another context, ‘more will mean worse.’ 4. ‘Federalism – which Britain’s partners wished to enshrine in the Maastricht agreement – would involve giving more and more power to Brussels.’ Instead, say British ...”

“... reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel. The element of apparent circuitousness in this approach to Larkin is perhaps excused by the ...”

“... Geordie Greig’s accounts of Freud’s behaviour reminded me at times of two unlikely novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden ...”