Matthew Adams

Battle Acts

Complete Stories

By

Penguin Classics 528pp £25 order from our bookshop

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!’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    • The author 'seethes with contemptuous indignation at the shiny junk that an unregulated construction industry dumps… ,
    • 'The physical courage he demonstrated as a young man [...] gave way to intellectual power; radical thought, gifted… ,
    • 'While Jane Austen didn’t perhaps achieve the full recognition that she deserved in her lifetime, even then she out… ,
    • 'All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And t… ,
    • 'You are interested in a particular subject; basic research hardens this interest into an obsession, after which th… ,
    Follow Us