Kingsley Amis’s critical lexicon was not a large one. It turned upon a single word – ‘good’ – dispensed with dashes of intensification or qualification as occasion demanded. The summit of his approbation was a fulsome ‘bloody good’. ‘Good’ meant that you had done really quite well; ‘some good’ (Amis’s verdict on his own body of novels) was not bad at all; and a curt ‘no good’ was about as damning as you could get. Unless, as Christopher Hitchens records in his memoir, Hitch-22, you happened to have produced something of the order of Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, which Amis declared ‘Absolutely no. Bloody good. AT ALL!’

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