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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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”