Kingsley Amis

English author, critic and teacher (1922–1995)

Sir

Kingsley Amis

CBE

Amis in 1970

Born| Kingsley William Amis
(1922-04-16)16 April 1922
Clapham, London, England
Died| 22 October 1995(1995-10-22) (aged 73)
London, England
Occupation|

* Novelist
* poet
* critic
* teacher

Alma mater| St John's College, Oxford
Period| 1947–1995
Genre| Fiction, fictional prose
Literary movement| Angry young men
Spouse|

* Hilary Ann Bardwell

(m. 1948; div. 1965)​

* Elizabeth Jane Howard

(m. 1965; div. 1983)​

Children| Philip Amis
Martin Amis
Sally Amis

Sir Kingsley William Amis CBE (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986).[1]

His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.[2] He was the father of the novelist Martin Amis.

## Life and career

[edit]

Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk—"quite an important one, fluent in Spanish and responsible for exporting mustard to South America"—for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London,[3] and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas).[4][5] The Amis grandparents were wealthy. William Amis's father, the glass merchant Joseph James Amis, owned a mansion called Barchester at Purley, then part of Surrey. Amis considered J. J. Amis—always called "Pater" or "Dadda"—"a jokey, excitable, silly little man", whom he "disliked and was repelled by".[6]

His wife Julia "was a large, dreadful, hairy-faced creature ... whom [Amis] loathed and feared". His mother's parents lived at Camberwell. Her father George was an enthusiastic collector of books and Baptist chapel organist who was employed at a Brixton gentleman's outfitters as a tailor's assistant[7] and was "the only grandparent [Amis] cared for". Amis hoped to inherit much of his grandfather's library, but his grandmother Jemima—whom Amis already disliked for her habit of mocking her husband when he read his favourite passages to Amis, making "faces and gestures at him while his head was lowered to the page"[7]—permitted him to take only five volumes, on condition he wrote "from his grandfather's collection" on the flyleaf of each.[6]

Amis was raised at Norbury—in his later estimation "not really a place. It's an expression on a map ... really I should say I came from Norbury station."[8] Having been educated first at St Hilda's, an "undistinguished, long-vanished local school ... an independent girls' school of the kind which also took small boys, before they became pubescent and dangerous", he then moved to nearby Norbury College.[9]

In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Amis (like his father before him) won a scholarship to the City of London School.[10] In April 1941, after his first year, he was admitted on a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he read English. There he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life.[11]

In June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.[11] He broke with communism in 1956, in view of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences".[12] In July 1942, he was called up for national service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals. He returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree.[13] Although he worked hard and earned a first in English in 1947, he had decided by then to give much of his time to writing.

In 1946 he met Hilary Bardwell. They married in 1948 after she became pregnant with their first child, Philip. Amis initially arranged for her to have a back-street abortion, but changed his mind, fearing for her safety. He was a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961.[14] Two other children followed: Martin[15] in August 1949 and Sally in January 1954.

Days after Sally's birth, Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, was published to great acclaim. Critics felt it had caught the flavour of Britain in the 1950s and ushered in a new style of fiction.[16] By 1972, its impressive sales in Britain had been matched by 1.25 million paperback copies sold in the United States. It was translated into 20 languages, including Polish, Hebrew, Korean, and Serbo-Croat.[17] The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis became one of the writers known as the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim was among the first British campus novels,[citation needed] setting a precedent for later generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.

In 1958–1959 Amis made the first of two visits to the United States, as a visiting fellow in creative writing at Princeton University and a visiting lecturer at other northeastern universities. On returning to Britain, he fell into a rut, and he began looking for another post. After 13 years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1961, but regretted the move within a year, finding Cambridge an academic and social disappointment. He resigned in 1963, intent on moving to Majorca, although he actually moved no further than London.[18][19]

In 1963, Hilary discovered that Amis was having an affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilary and Amis separated in August and he went to live with Howard, divorcing Hilary and marrying Howard in 1965. In 1968 he moved with Howard to Lemmons, a house in Barnet, north London. She and Amis divorced in 1983.

In his last years, Amis shared a house with Hilary and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock. Martin's memoir Experience contains much about the life, charm and decline of his father.

Amis was knighted in 1990. In August 1995 he fell, following a suspected stroke. After apparently recovering, he worsened and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London.[20][21] He was cremated and his ashes laid to rest at Golders Green Crematorium.

## Literary work

[edit]

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Amis is widely known as a comic novelist of life in mid- to late-20th-century Britain, but his literary work covered many genres: poetry, essays, criticism, short stories, food and drink, anthologies, and several novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery. His career initially developed inversely to that of his close friend Philip Larkin. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published two novels; Amis originally sought to be a poet and turned to novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry in a straightforward, accessible style that often masks a nuance of thought.

Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), satirises the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history. It was widely perceived as part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s, in reacting against the stultification of conventional British life, although Amis never encouraged this interpretation. Amis's other 1950s and early 1960s novels likewise depict contemporary situations drawn from his experience.

That Uncertain Feeling (1955) features a young provincial librarian (perhaps with an eye to Larkin working as a librarian in Hull) and his temptation to adultery. I Like It Here (1958) takes a contemptuous view of "abroad" after Amis's own travels on the Continent with a young family. Take a Girl Like You (1960) steps away from the immediately autobiographical but remains grounded in the concerns of sex and love in ordinary modern life, tracing a young schoolmaster's courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine.

With The Anti-Death League (1966), Amis begins to show some of the experimentation—in content, if not style—that marked much of his work in the 1960s and 1970s. His departure from the strict realism of his early comedic novels is not as abrupt as it might first appear. He had been avidly reading science fiction since he was a boy and developed that interest in the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958 while visiting Princeton University. These were published that year as New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, giving a serious yet light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society.

Amis was especially keen on the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth and, in New Maps of Hell, coined the term "comic inferno" to describe a type of humorous dystopia exemplified by the work of Robert Sheckley. He further displayed his devotion to the genre in editing, with the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, the science-fiction anthology series Spectrum I–V, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.

Though not explicitly science fiction, The Anti-Death League takes liberties with reality not found in Amis's earlier novels. It introduces a speculative bent that continued to develop in others of his genre novels, such as The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration (1976) (alternative history). Much of this speculation concerned the improbability of the existence of any benevolent deity involved in human affairs.

In The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, The Alteration and elsewhere, including poems such as "The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment" and "New Approach Needed", Amis showed frustration with a God who could lace the world with cruelty and injustice, and championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness—in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure—against the demands of any cosmological scheme. Amis's religious views appear in a response reported in his Memoirs. To the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's question, "You atheist?" Amis replied, "It's more that I hate Him."

During this time, Amis had not turned completely away from the comedic realism of Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You. I Want It Now (1968) and Girl, 20 (1971) both depict the "swinging" atmosphere of late-1960s London, in which Amis certainly participated, though neither book is strictly autobiographical. Girl, 20, for instance, is set in the world of classical (and pop) music, in which Amis had no part. The book's noticeable command of music terminology and opinion shows Amis's amateur devotion to music and almost journalistic capacity to explore a subject that interested him. That intelligence is similarly displayed in the ecclesiastical matters in The Alteration; Amis was neither a Roman Catholic nor a devotee of any church.

Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Amis regularly produced essays and criticism, principally for periodical publication. Some were collected in 1968 into What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Essays, in which Amis's wit and literary and social opinions were displayed on books such as Colin Wilson's The Outsider (panned), Iris Murdoch's début novel Under the Net (praised), and William Empson's Milton's God (inclined to agreement). Amis's opinions on books and people tended to appear, and often were, conservative, and yet, as the title essay of the collection shows, he was not merely reverent of "the classics" and of traditional morals but more disposed to exercise his own rather independent judgement in all things.

Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which he admired, in the late 1960s, when he began composing critical works connected with Bond, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. In 1965, he wrote the popular James Bond Dossier under his own name. The same year, he wrote The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", Tanner being M's chief of staff in many of Fleming's novels. In 1968, Amis wrote Colonel Sun, which was published under the pseudonym "Robert Markham".

Amis's literary style and tone changed significantly after 1970, with the possible exception of The Old Devils, a Booker Prize winner. Several critics found him old-fashioned and misogynistic. His Stanley and the Women, an exploration of social sanity, could be said to instance these traits. Others said that his output lacked his earlier work's humanity, wit and compassion.

This period also saw Amis as an anthologist, displaying a wide knowledge of all kinds of English poetry. The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), which he edited, was a revision of an original volume by W. H. Auden. Amis took it in a markedly new direction: Auden had interpreted light verse to include "low" verse of working-class or lower-class origin, regardless of subject matter, while Amis defined light verse as essentially light in tone, though not necessarily simple in composition. The Amis Anthology (1988), a personal selection of his favourite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspaper, in which he selected a poem a day and gave it a brief introduction.[22]

Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, for Ending Up (1974) and Jake's Thing (1978), and finally, as a prizewinner for The Old Devils in 1986.[23]

In 2008, The Times ranked Amis 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.[24][25]

## Personal life

[edit]

### Political views

[edit]

As a young man at Oxford, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and left it in 1956.[26][27] He later described this stage of his political life as "the callow Marxist phase that seemed almost compulsory in Oxford."[28] Amis remained nominally on the political left for some time after the war, declaring in the 1950s that he would always vote for the Labour Party.[29]

Amis eventually moved further to the political right, a development he discussed in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967); his conservatism and anti-communism are visible in works like the dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).[30] In 1967, Amis, Robert Conquest, John Braine, and several other authors signed a letter to The Times entitled "Backing for U.S. Policies in Vietnam", supporting the US government in the Vietnam War.[31] He spoke at the Adam Smith Institute, arguing against government subsidy to the arts.[32]

### Character

[edit]

By his own admission and according to his biographers, Amis was a serial adulterer for much of his life. This was a major contributory factor in the breakdown of his first marriage. A famous photograph of a sleeping Amis on a Yugoslav beach shows the slogan (written in lipstick by wife Hilary) on his back "1 Fat Englishman—I fuck anything."[33]

In one memoir, Amis wrote, "Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time".[34] He suggests this reflects a naïve tendency in readers to apply the behaviour of his characters to himself. He enjoyed drink and spent a good deal of time in pubs. Hilary Rubinstein, who accepted Lucky Jim for Victor Gollancz, commented, "I doubted whether Jim Dixon would have gone to the pub and drunk ten pints of beer.... I didn't know Kingsley very well, you see."[35]

Clive James commented: "All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the Garrick Club even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to the taxi."[36] But Amis was adamant that inspiration did not come from a bottle: "Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work."[34]

This matched a disciplined approach to writing. For "many years" Amis imposed a rigorous daily schedule on himself, segregating writing and drink. Mornings were spent on writing, with a minimum daily output of 500 words.[37] Drinking began about lunchtime, when this had been achieved. Such self-discipline was essential to Amis's prodigious output.

Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself deliberately.... It seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct."[36] His friend Christopher Hitchens said: "The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health."[38]

### Antisemitism

[edit]

Amis had an unclear relationship with antisemitism, which he sometimes expressed but also claimed to dislike.[39] He occasionally speculated on the commonly advanced Jewish stereotypes. Antisemitism was sometimes present in his conversations and letters to friends and associates, such as "The great Jewish vice is glibness, fluency ... also possibly just bullshit, as in Marx, Freud, Marcuse", or "Chaplin [who was not Jewish] is a horse's arse. He's a Jeeeew you see, like the Marx Brothers, like Danny Kaye." It is a minor theme in his Stanley and the Women novel about a paranoid schizophrenic. As for the cultural complexion of the United States, Amis had this to say: "I've finally worked out why I don't like Americans ... . Because everyone there is either a Jew or a hick." Amis himself described his antisemitism as "very mild".[40]

## Family

[edit]

Amis's first, 15-year marriage was to Hilary Bardwell,[41] the daughter of a civil servant,[42] by whom he had two sons and one daughter: Philip Amis, a graphics designer;[42] Martin Amis, a novelist who died in 2023;[43] and Sally Amis, who died in 2000.

Amis was married a second time, to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard from 1965 to 1983, with whom he had no children. At the end of that marriage, he went to live with his former wife Hilary and her third husband, in a deal brokered by their two sons Philip and Martin to ensure he could be cared for until his death.[44]

Amis's niece Lucy Partington was a murder victim in 1974 of the Gloucester serial killers Fred and Rosemary West

## Partial bibliography

[edit]

### Poetry

[edit]

* 1947 Bright November
* 1953 A Frame of Mind
* 1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits
* 1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946–1956
* 1962 The Evans County
* 1968 A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967
* 1979 Collected Poems 1944–78

### Fiction

[edit]

Novels

* c. 1948 The Legacy (unpublished)
* 1954 Lucky Jim
* 1955 That Uncertain Feeling
* 1958 I Like It Here
* 1960 Take a Girl Like You
* 1963 One Fat Englishman
* 1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest)
* 1966 The Anti-Death League
* 1968 Colonel Sun: a James Bond Adventure (pseud. Robert Markham)
* 1968 I Want It Now
* 1969 The Green Man
* 1971 Girl, 20
* 1973 The Riverside Villas Murder
* 1974 Ending Up
* 1975 The Crime of the Century
* 1976 The Alteration
* 1978 Jake's Thing
* 1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek
* 1984 Stanley and the Women
* 1986 The Old Devils
* 1988 Difficulties with Girls
* 1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill
* 1991 We Are All Guilty
* 1992 The Russian Girl
* 1994 You Can't Do Both
* 1995 The Biographer's Moustache
* c. 1995 Black and White (unfinished)[45]

Short fiction collections

* 1962 My Enemy's Enemy
* 1980 Collected Short Stories
* 1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories

Other short fiction

* 1960 "Hemingway in Space" (short story), Punch, December 1960

### Non-fiction

[edit]

* 1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals, a Fabian Society pamphlet
* 1960 New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction
* 1965 The James Bond Dossier
* 1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (pseud. Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner)
* 1970 What Became of Jane Austen?, and Other Questions
* 1972 On Drink
* 1974 Rudyard Kipling and His World
* 1983 Everyday Drinking
* 1984 How's Your Glass?
* 1990 The Amis Collection
* 1991 Memoirs
* 1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (name in part a pun as he was sometimes called "Kingers" or "The King" by friends and family, as told by his son Martin in his memoir Experience)
* 2001 The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Edited by Zachary Leader
* 2008 Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, Introduction by Christopher Hitchens (an omnibus edition of On Drink, Everyday Drinking and How's Your Glass?)

### Editor

[edit]

* 1961–66 Spectrum anthology series (ed. with Robert Conquest)(Five volumes)
* 1978 The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (ed.)
* 1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction (ed.)

* Biography portal
* Poetry portal

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Norwich, John Julius (1990). Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Arts. USA: Oxford University Press. p. 15\. ISBN 978-0198691372.
2. ^ "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on 19 February 2020. Retrieved 26 September 2020.
3. ^ Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, Neil Powell, Pan Macmillan, 2012, p. 3
4. ^ Kingsley Amis: Memoirs, Vintage Classics, 2004, p. 14.
5. ^ Barratt, Nick (9 June 2007). "Family detective". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 1 May 2008. Retrieved 7 May 2010..
6. ^ a b Memoirs (2004), pp. 1–5.
7. ^ a b Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, Neil Powell, Pan Macmillan, 2012, p. 5
8. ^ Bookmark, BBC TV, "Kingsley Amis: The Memoirs".
9. ^ Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, Neil Powell, Pan Macmillan, 2012, pp. 4, 9–10
10. ^ Memoirs (2004), pp. xvi and 14.
11. ^ a b Leader (2006), p. 108,
12. ^ Martin Amis (2002).
13. ^ Sillery, A.; Sillery, V. (1975). St. John's College Biographical Register 1919-1975. Vol. 3\. Oxford: St. John’s College. p. 170.
14. ^ Leader, 2006, p. 452.
15. ^ "Sir Kingsley Amis Dies; British Novelist and Poet", The Washington Post, 23 October 1995; Leader, 2006, p. 1.
16. ^ Malcolm Bradbury, 1989, p. 205; Ritchie, 1988, p. 64.
17. ^ Jacobs, 1995, p. 162.
18. ^ Memoirs, "Cambridge".
19. ^ Bradford, Ch. 10.
20. ^ "Sir Kingsley Amis Dies; British Novelist and Poet", Washington Post, 23 October 1995.
21. ^ Bradford, Ch 23.
22. ^ Fussell, The Anti-Egotist.
23. ^ The Man Booker Prizes Kingsley Amis at the Wayback Machine (archived 24 February 2012)
24. ^ The 50 greatest British writers since 1945 Archived 25 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine. The Times, 5 January 2008, accessed 8 February 2010.
25. ^ "List". Archived from the original on 5 December 2011. Retrieved 25 November 2011.
26. ^ Martin Amis, Koba the Dread (2002).
27. ^ Farmer, Ben (28 November 2017). "MI5 reports on Amis. Retrieved 21 January 2019". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 21 January 2019. Retrieved 21 January 2019.
28. ^ Amis, Socialism and the Intellectuals, cited by Leader, 2006, p. 366.
29. ^ Leader, 2006, p. 366.
30. ^ Neal Ascherson, "Red Souls" Archived 20 June 2019 at the Wayback Machine, London Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 10, May 1980. Retrieved 20 June 2019.
31. ^ John Wakeman, World Authors 1950–1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth Century Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, pp. 448–448 ISBN 0824204190.
32. ^ Madsen Pirie, Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute, Biteback Publishing, 2012, p. 140.
33. ^ Leader 2006, opposite p. 565.
34. ^ a b Memoirs: "Booze".
35. ^ Quoted in Bradford, Chapter 5.
36. ^ a b Clive James, "Kingsley without the women", Times Literary Supplement, 2 February 2007.
37. ^ Jacobs, 1995, pp. 6 and 17.
38. ^ Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking, New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008, editor's introduction.
39. ^ Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 357–358.
40. ^ Julius, p. 358.
41. ^ Hilary Amis was later wife to the classicist D. R. Shackleton Bailey (married 1967; divorced 1975) and the late Lord Kilmarnock (married 1977; died 19 March 2009). She had a son James or Jaime, born still out of wedlock, by her third husband (often called her second husband by the media), who was therefore unable to inherit his father's peerage.
42. ^ a b Mira Stout. "Martin Amis: Down London's Mean Streets" Archived 8 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine, The New York Times Book Review, 4 February 1990. Sunday, Late Edition – Final Section 6; p. 32, Column 1; Magazine Desk.
43. ^ Boyd Tonkin, "Martin Amis: The man who fell to earth" Archived 7 July 2022 at the Wayback Machine, The Independent, 13 May 2000.
44. ^ Jacobs, Eric (23 October 1995). "Sir Kingsley Amis obituary: From angry young man to old devil". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 23 October 2023. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
45. ^ Leader 2006, pp. 778–779.

## Sources

[edit]

* Amis, Kingsley (1992). Kingsley Amis: Memoirs. Penguin.
* Amis, Kingsley (2000). Leader, Zachary (ed.). The Letters of Kingsley Amis. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-257095-5.
* Bradbury, Malcolm (1989). No, Not Bloomsbury. Arena. ISBN 0-09-954410-5.
* Bradford, Richard (2001). Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. Peter Owen. ISBN 0-7206-1117-2.
* Fussell, Paul (1994). The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. Oxford UP.
* Jacobs, Eric (1995). Kingsley Amis, a Biography. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-59072-6.
* Leader, Zachary (2006). The Life of Kingsley Amis. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-06227-1.
* Powell, Neil (2008). Amis & Son – Two literary generations. Pan Macmillan. ISBN 9781405054621.
* Ritchie, Harry (1988). Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959. Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-14764-X.
* Kingsley Amis's Troublesome Fun, Michael Dirda. The Chronicle of Higher Education 22 June 2007. B9-B11.
* Amis, Martin (2002). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Talk Miramax Books. ISBN 978-1400032204.

## External links

[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Kingsley Amis.

* Kingsley Amis at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
* "Kingsley Amis in the Great Tradition and in Our Time," by Robert H. Bell, Williams College. Introduction to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, ed. Robert H. Bell, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998.
* Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
* Michael Barber (Winter 1975). "Kingsley Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 59". The Paris Review. Winter 1975 (64).
* "The Serious Comedian", by Tom Chatfield, Prospect, a review of Zachary Leader's biography.
* "The old devil" – article on Amis by Mark Steyn in The New Criterion
* The Amis Inheritance—Profile on Martin and Kingsley Amis by Charles McGrath from New York Times Magazine (22 April 2007).
* Kingsley Amis Collection Archived 16 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
* Kingsley Amis Literary Estate
* Portraits of Kingsley Amis at the National Portrait Gallery, London
* "Archival material relating to Kingsley Amis". UK National Archives.

* v
* t
* e

Kingsley Amis

Novels|

* Lucky Jim (1954)
* That Uncertain Feeling (1955)
* I Like It Here (1958)
* Take a Girl Like You (1960)
* The Anti-Death League (1966)
* Colonel Sun (1968)
* The Green Man (1969)
* Girl, 20 (1971)
* The Alteration (1976)
* Jake's Thing (1978)
* Stanley and the Women (1984)
* The Old Devils (1986)
* The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990)
* The Russian Girl (1992)

Non-fiction|

* The James Bond Dossier (1965)
* The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (1965)
* The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2001)

Film and
television adaptations|

* Lucky Jim (1957)
* Only Two Can Play (1962)
* Further Adventures of Lucky Jim (1967)
* Take a Girl Like You (1970)
* The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim (1982)
* That Uncertain Feeling (1986)
* The Green Man (1990)
* Stanley and the Women (1991)
* The Old Devils (1992)
* Take a Girl Like You (2000)
* Lucky Jim (2003)

Related|

* Elizabeth Jane Howard (wife)
* Martin Amis (son)
* Robert Markham (pseudonym)
* Lemmons (home)

* v
* t
* e

"Angry young men"

Associated
writers

* Kingsley Amis
* John Arden
* Stan Barstow
* Edward Bond
* John Braine
* Michael Hastings
* Thomas Hinde
* Stuart Holroyd
* Bill Hopkins
* John Osborne
* Harold Pinter
* Alan Sillitoe
* David Storey
* Kenneth Tynan
* John Wain
* Keith Waterhouse
* Arnold Wesker
* Colin Wilson

Key works|

* Billy Liar
* Declaration
* The Divine and the Decay
* Emergence from Chaos
* The Entertainer
* A Kind of Loving
* "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner"
* Look Back in Anger
* Lucky Jim
* The Outsider
* Room at the Top
* Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
* Saved
* Serjeant Musgrave's Dance
* This Sporting Life

Related|

* The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s
* British New Wave
* Kitchen sink realism
* The Movement

* v
* t
* e

Recipients of the Booker Prize

* List of winners and nominated authors
* The Best of the Booker
* The Golden Man Booker
* International Booker Prize

1969–79|

* 1969: P. H. Newby (Something to Answer For)
* 1970: Bernice Rubens (The Elected Member)
* 1970 Lost Prize: J. G. Farrell (Troubles)
* 1971: V. S. Naipaul (In a Free State)
* 1972: John Berger (G.)
* 1973: J. G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur)
* 1974: Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist) and Stanley Middleton (Holiday)
* 1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Heat and Dust)
* 1976: David Storey (Saville)
* 1977: Paul Scott (Staying On)
* 1978: Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea)
* 1979: Penelope Fitzgerald (Offshore)

1980s|

* 1980: William Golding (Rites of Passage)
* 1981: Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)
* 1982: Thomas Keneally (Schindler's Ark)
* 1983: J. M. Coetzee (Life & Times of Michael K)
* 1984: Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac)
* 1985: Keri Hulme (The Bone People)
* 1986: Kingsley Amis (The Old Devils)
* 1987: Penelope Lively (Moon Tiger)
* 1988: Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda)
* 1989: Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)

1990s|

* 1990: A. S. Byatt (Possession)
* 1991: Ben Okri (The Famished Road)
* 1992: Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) and Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger)
* 1993: Roddy Doyle (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha)
* 1994: James Kelman (How Late It Was, How Late)
* 1995: Pat Barker (The Ghost Road)
* 1996: Graham Swift (Last Orders)
* 1997: Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
* 1998: Ian McEwan (Amsterdam)
* 1999: J. M. Coetzee (Disgrace)

2000s|

* 2000: Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
* 2001: Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang)
* 2002: Yann Martel (Life of Pi)
* 2003: DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little)
* 2004: Alan Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty)
* 2005: John Banville (The Sea)
* 2006: Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss)
* 2007: Anne Enright (The Gathering)
* 2008: Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
* 2009: Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall)

2010s|

* 2010: Howard Jacobson (The Finkler Question)
* 2011: Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
* 2012: Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies)
* 2013: Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries)
* 2014: Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North)
* 2015: Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings)
* 2016: Paul Beatty (The Sellout)
* 2017: George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo)
* 2018: Anna Burns (Milkman)
* 2019: Margaret Atwood (The Testaments) and Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)

2020s|

* 2020: Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain)
* 2021: Damon Galgut (The Promise)
* 2022: Shehan Karunatilaka (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida)
* 2023: Paul Lynch (Prophet Song)
* 2024: Samantha Harvey (Orbital)

* v
* t
* e

James Bond in literature

James Bond

James Bond
series|

| Ian Fleming|

* Casino Royale (1953)
* Live and Let Die (1954)
* Moonraker (1955)
* Diamonds Are Forever (1956)
* From Russia, with Love (1957)
* Dr. No (1958)
* Goldfinger (1959)
* For Your Eyes Only (1960)
* Thunderball (1961)
* The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
* On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)
* You Only Live Twice (1964)
* The Man with the Golden Gun (1965)
* Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966)

|

Kingsley Amis|

* Colonel Sun (1968)

John Gardner|

* Licence Renewed (1981)
* For Special Services (1982)
* Icebreaker (1983)
* Role of Honour (1984)
* Nobody Lives for Ever (1986)
* No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)
* Scorpius (1988)
* Win, Lose or Die (1989)
* Brokenclaw (1990)
* The Man from Barbarossa (1991)
* Death Is Forever (1992)
* Never Send Flowers (1993)
* SeaFire (1994)
* Cold (1996)

Raymond Benson|

* Zero Minus Ten (1997)
* The Facts of Death (1998)
* High Time to Kill (1999)
* DoubleShot (2000)
* Never Dream of Dying (2001)
* The Man with the Red Tattoo (2002)

Sebastian Faulks|

* Devil May Care (2008)

Jeffery Deaver|

* Carte Blanche (2011)

William Boyd|

* Solo (2013)

Anthony Horowitz|

* Trigger Mortis (2015)
* Forever and a Day (2018)
* With a Mind to Kill (2022)

Novelizations|

| Christopher Wood|

* James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
* James Bond and Moonraker (1979)

|

Spin-off
works|

| R. D. Mascott|

* The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½ (1967)

|

John Pearson|

* James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007 (1973)

Young Bond series|

| Charlie Higson|

* SilverFin (2005)
* Blood Fever (2006)
* Double or Die (2007)
* Hurricane Gold (2007)
* By Royal Command (2008)

|

Steve Cole|

* Shoot to Kill (2014)
* Heads You Die (2016)

The Moneypenny Diaries
Samantha Weinberg|

* Guardian Angel (2005)
* Secret Servant (2006)
* Final Fling (2008)

Unofficial
works|

* Take Over (1970)
* The Killing Zone (1985)

Unpublished
works|

* Per Fine Ounce (1966)

Related
works|

* Double O Seven, James Bond, A Report (1964)
* The James Bond Dossier (1965)
* The Book of Bond (1965)
* The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984)
* The Battle for Bond (2007)
* Danger Society: The Young Bond Dossier (2009)

Related|

* James Bond uncollected short stories
* Bibliography of works on James Bond

* v
* t
* e

Martin Amis

Novels|

* The Rachel Papers (1973)
* Dead Babies (1975)
* Success (1978)
* Other People: A Mystery Story (1981)
* Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
* London Fields (1989)
* Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991)
* The Information (1995)
* Night Train (1997)
* Yellow Dog (2003)
* House of Meetings (2006)
* The Pregnant Widow (2010)
* Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012)
* The Zone of Interest (2014)
* Inside Story (2020)

Short story collections|

* Einstein's Monsters (1987)
* Two Stories (1994)
* Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998)

Screenplays|

* Saturn 3 (1980)
* London Fields (2018)

Non-fiction|

* Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982)
* The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986)
* Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993)
* Experience (2000)
* The War Against Cliché (2001)
* Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002)
* The Second Plane (2008)
* The Rub of Time (2017)

Screen adaptations|

* The Rachel Papers (1989)
* Dead Babies (2000)
* Money (2010)
* London Fields (2018)
* The Zone of Interest (2023)

Miscellaneous|

* Kingsley Amis
* Lemmons

Authority control databases

International|

* ISNI
* 2
* 3
* VIAF
* 2
* FAST
* WorldCat

National|

* Germany
* United States
* 2
* France
* BnF data
* Japan
* Italy
* Australia
* Czech Republic
* Spain
* Portugal
* Netherlands
* Norway
* Latvia
* Croatia
* Chile
* Greece
* Korea
* Sweden
* Poland
* Israel
* Finland
* Catalonia
* 2
* Belgium
* 2

Academics|

* CiNii

Artists|

* MusicBrainz
* FID

People|

* Trove
* Deutsche Biographie
* DDB

Other|

* IdRef
* SNAC

*[m.]: married
*[div.]: divorced
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