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Amis Collection
This collection is vintage Amis from a succcession of good years. A selection of his non-fiction pieces in the form of reviews, articles, broadcasts and letters are gathered together in this book. Topics such as writers and writing, "abroad", eating and drinking, music, language, educational and social questions are examined. Such Amis hobby-horses as arts subsidies, literary prizes and jazz are also featured as well as writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Anthony Burgess and Ian Fleming. Among poets, the great Victorians are celebrated, and serious consideration is given to Philip Larkin.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
400 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 1990
About the author
Kingsley Amis
221 books580 followersBest known novels of British writer Sir Kingsley William Amis include
Lucky Jim
(1954) and
The Old Devils
(1986).
This English poet, critic, and teacher composed more than twenty-three collections, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered Martin Amis.
William Robert Amis, a clerk of a mustard manufacturer, fathered him. He began his education at the city of London school, and went up to college of Saint John, Oxford, in April 1941 to read English; he met Philip Larkin and formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, the Army called him for service in July 1942. After serving as a lieutenant in the royal corps of signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. He worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, and then decided to devote much of his time.
Pen names: [authorRobert Markham|553548] and William Bill Tanner
This English poet, critic, and teacher composed more than twenty-three collections, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered Martin Amis.
William Robert Amis, a clerk of a mustard manufacturer, fathered him. He began his education at the city of London school, and went up to college of Saint John, Oxford, in April 1941 to read English; he met Philip Larkin and formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, the Army called him for service in July 1942. After serving as a lieutenant in the royal corps of signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. He worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, and then decided to devote much of his time.
Pen names: [authorRobert Markham|553548] and William Bill Tanner
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 31, 2010
Since I read Paul Fussell's book, "The Anti-Egoist: Kingley Amis, Man of Letters," it seemed like a good idea to actually read some of Amis's nonfiction. Now I've read more than I ever want to again.
On the one hand he is definitely a good, clear writer, and he has a way of disliking something that makes you want to agree with him, or at least feel unnatural for not doing so. There's one essay at the beginning in which he dismisses most of American literature (James/Melville/Twain--Nabokov, even) that's kind of breathtaking in its amusing disdain. He has a healthy dislike of pretension and (especially) of "experts" deciding what makes a piece of art good.
On the other hand, after three-hundred pages of dislike, you start to wonder if he's capable of liking anything, really. At least anything currently around him. Fussell plays up his "populism," and equates his dislike of all forms of modernism and anything difficult as evidence of that. But you soon realize that Amis doesn't much care for what everyday people like either--maybe he doesn't notice it, but he's frequently insulting them for their uneducated taste for tripe. So you get a slim description of certain things he likes--Larkin, Tennyson, old mysteries, Robert Heinlein, Anthony Powell, alcohol. And a large swath of things that show evidence of how things have dropped off since he was young: jazz, sci-fi, different cities, etc. etc. etc.
Even ignoring his "social commentary" (read: knee-jerk dismissal of anything left-leaning) it becomes heavy going, the humor labored and less funny than he thinks. When he got to complaining that eyeglasses were made wrong nowadays, and he can't get any that don't slide down his nose, I realized that he was just a crank. A talented, occasionally entertaining, often annoyingly wrong-headed crank.
On the one hand he is definitely a good, clear writer, and he has a way of disliking something that makes you want to agree with him, or at least feel unnatural for not doing so. There's one essay at the beginning in which he dismisses most of American literature (James/Melville/Twain--Nabokov, even) that's kind of breathtaking in its amusing disdain. He has a healthy dislike of pretension and (especially) of "experts" deciding what makes a piece of art good.
On the other hand, after three-hundred pages of dislike, you start to wonder if he's capable of liking anything, really. At least anything currently around him. Fussell plays up his "populism," and equates his dislike of all forms of modernism and anything difficult as evidence of that. But you soon realize that Amis doesn't much care for what everyday people like either--maybe he doesn't notice it, but he's frequently insulting them for their uneducated taste for tripe. So you get a slim description of certain things he likes--Larkin, Tennyson, old mysteries, Robert Heinlein, Anthony Powell, alcohol. And a large swath of things that show evidence of how things have dropped off since he was young: jazz, sci-fi, different cities, etc. etc. etc.
Even ignoring his "social commentary" (read: knee-jerk dismissal of anything left-leaning) it becomes heavy going, the humor labored and less funny than he thinks. When he got to complaining that eyeglasses were made wrong nowadays, and he can't get any that don't slide down his nose, I realized that he was just a crank. A talented, occasionally entertaining, often annoyingly wrong-headed crank.
August 18, 2022
Philip Larkin's publisher asked him to consider a second volume of prose writing as a follow-up to his Required Writing collection. Larkin suggested sardonically that it might be titled 'The Bottom of the Barrel". This book shares the same position in relation to Amis's What became of Jane Austen? and other questions (1971) and perhaps might be similarly titled. I discovered the Jane Austen collection while tracking down all the Amis I could find after reading Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You, and had been impressed by its wit, wisdom, iconoclasm and liveliness, and so had high hopes for more of the same. Sadly, to coin a phrase, MORE WILL MEAN WORSE, at least in this case. The general rule of thumb with Amis is that up to the late 70s his work is consistently good (with the odd dip here and there (I Like It Here, I Want It Now), and anything after that is not (I would say The Old Devils (1986) was a surprise outlier), and that certainly operates here, and it is late Amis that dominates the volume.
Some topics recur and produce a satisfying range of perspectives- multiple reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Taylor, Anthony Powell, Dylan Thomas provide a mixture of contemporary reaction and retrospective assessment; a long travel journal exemplifies and critiques the form, and he writes on poetry, especially pre-Modernist poetry.
Amis wouldn't claim to be a great political thinker and his contributions to higher education policy and arts funding (aligning himself with small-state Thatcherism) are full of vigour and attitude but light on analysis. He claims that arts funding leads to bad art, releasing the artists from the need to interest a mass audience and allowing them instead to please themselves, their peers, and academic critics. Well, perhaps. But left to commercial pressures, theatre would became an ocean of pantomimes and jukebox musicals, and poetry in print would hardly exist. Not that he'd mind that too much - his dislike of all modern poetry apart from Larkin's (and presumably his own) is as strong as his dislike of Picasso and all later art, of jazz after 1941, of classical music after Tchaikovsky, of science fiction after about 1960 . . . It's true that this dislike is often expressing wittily, but the gloom pervades as time after time work is dismissed not because it is bad of its sort, but because it is simply of its sort.
The test of this type of publication is whether one's time would be better employed reading, or re-reading, the fiction, and I would say yes, even though there were a scatter of laugh-out-loud moments to be found here.
Some topics recur and produce a satisfying range of perspectives- multiple reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Taylor, Anthony Powell, Dylan Thomas provide a mixture of contemporary reaction and retrospective assessment; a long travel journal exemplifies and critiques the form, and he writes on poetry, especially pre-Modernist poetry.
Amis wouldn't claim to be a great political thinker and his contributions to higher education policy and arts funding (aligning himself with small-state Thatcherism) are full of vigour and attitude but light on analysis. He claims that arts funding leads to bad art, releasing the artists from the need to interest a mass audience and allowing them instead to please themselves, their peers, and academic critics. Well, perhaps. But left to commercial pressures, theatre would became an ocean of pantomimes and jukebox musicals, and poetry in print would hardly exist. Not that he'd mind that too much - his dislike of all modern poetry apart from Larkin's (and presumably his own) is as strong as his dislike of Picasso and all later art, of jazz after 1941, of classical music after Tchaikovsky, of science fiction after about 1960 . . . It's true that this dislike is often expressing wittily, but the gloom pervades as time after time work is dismissed not because it is bad of its sort, but because it is simply of its sort.
The test of this type of publication is whether one's time would be better employed reading, or re-reading, the fiction, and I would say yes, even though there were a scatter of laugh-out-loud moments to be found here.
January 2, 2025
Yo sé que el famoso es él y luego, su hijo Martín pero la verdad es que yo solamente conocía a Martin Amis quién además curiosamente tuvo un acercamiento a Uruguay, vivió muchos años en Punta del Este y desde hace años leo sus novelas y también entrevistas. Encontré esta colección de Kingsley Amis y me dio curiosidad leerla. Está muy bien editada con notas que van del 54 al 90 divididas en temas vinculados a la escritura, escritores , poetas, antologías, preguntas sociales, educación, lenguaje , películas, música, comida y bebida, etc. Algunas notas envejecieron mal, otras son repetitivas; las dedicadas a Evelyn Waugh por ejemplo. Algunas son muy divertidas, como el diccionario abreviado de educación con el que lloré de risa. Cuando se leen muchos artículos de crítica literaria de hace décadas, çmuchos de los autores reseñados no superaron la prueba del tiempo, no sabemos quiénes son, ya no se editan, y se pierde el interés. Me ocurrió lo mismo con la obra crítica de Edgar Allan Poe pero su sarcasmo monumental me mantuvo interesada todo el rato. Con Kinglsey, mi interés se limitó a leer notas sobre las figuras que conozco .
January 13, 2026
I think through reading this I have realised that me and Kingsley Amis would not like each other, as a matter of fact, despite his writing there is not much else I like about the man. This is what happens when you do a little bit of research on the writers you are reading, especially on their political background. Despite, this his words do not fail him and his writing is precise and cuts to the point in a clear and concise way. My issue is, as with all anthologies of non-fiction essays such as this one, that the composition fails them. I mean why do I have to read about Amis's dislike of a poet over and over, or his complaints and grumbles over the english language. Such things were clearly meant to be serialised and not viewed as one collective. Still, despite his grumpiness I think he has shown me too that this will be the last of the non-fiction essays, at least until I switch to something new and a new series of reading emerges.
February 1, 2022
Brideshead Revisited is one of my favorite books. Funny and wise about the way certain people become entwined in the core of your being, until part of yourself will always define yourself as "their friend" or "their lover" until you die. How often these people are not the correct people, so your college boyfriend has a greater gravitational pull on your mind and soul while your Father or Wife just sort of glance off of you. It's beautiful, sad, mean and funny and one of my favorite books about how people work.
That said, Amis summing it up as, "How I lived in a very big house and found God," is a truly excellent burn.
That said, Amis summing it up as, "How I lived in a very big house and found God," is a truly excellent burn.
February 18, 2025
This collection is vintage Amis from a succession of good years. A selection of his non-fiction pieces in the form of reviews, articles, broadcasts and letters are gathered together in this book. Topics such as writers and writing, "abroad", eating and drinking, music, language, educational and social questions are examined. Such Amis hobby-horses as arts subsidies, literary prizes and jazz are also featured as well as writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Anthony Burgess and Ian Fleming. Among poets, the great Victorians are celebrated, and serious consideration is given to Philip Larkin.
January 10, 2016
Very good collection of non-fiction. The restaurant reviews are hilarious, the other pieces are all both fascinating and beautifully written (whether you're in agreement with him or not).
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews