D J Taylor
Double Trouble
Kingsley Amis may only be thirteen years dead and Martin Amis still a year or so short of his sixtieth birthday, but all this – the books by and about them, the detailed analysis of novels that are sometimes not quite strong enough to bear the weight of critical explication – has been going on for a very long time. On the shelf beside me as I write this are, in chronological order, Kingsley’s Memoirs (1991), Eric Jacobs’s Kingsley Amis: A Biography (1995), Martin’s Experience (2000), Zachary Leader’s edition of The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000), Richard Bradford’s Lucky Him (2001), advertised as a ‘biography’ but in fact an exceptionally astute critical survey, and Leader’s jumbo-sized The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006). They are all interesting books, up to a point, but there are an awful lot of them and the message emerging from their three or four thousand collective pages is generally the same. No disrespect, therefore, to say of Neil Powell and his thoughtfully written study that one can think of novelists twice as good who have attracted half the volume of scholarly, or not so scholarly, exegesis.
Biographies of Kingsley Amis necessarily turn upon a single question: how to account for what the late Ian Hamilton, reviewing the Memoirs, called the ‘deeper enmity’ of the Amis stance, an antagonism towards – well, it might be anything from Nabokov’s prose style to a presumptuous sub-editor – that seems
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'In 2007, German scientists analysed the soil of this lunar landscape and found that 17 per cent of its weight was made up of arsenic. The ground wasn’t poisoned – it was poison.'
http://ow.ly/Ck7j50Er3mu
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up
This spring, give the gift of reading.
Give a friend a gift subscription to Literary Review for only £33.50.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring21/