More than thirty-five years after the turbulence attending the publication of his overwhelmingly popular first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), Kingsley Amis remains a controversial figure in English letters. Many find him an affable and entertaining novelist wh...

"Crisp, witty, sardonic...." That is one way to introduce Kingsley Amis, the way one editor, Edward Lucie-Smith, took in 1970. Amis's wit began to delight the world in 1954 when his first novel, Lucky Jim, appeared. In verse it had begun to delight his f...

Author of seventeen novels, three poetry collections, and more than twenty short stories, Kingsley Amis is a writer whose literary style defies categorization. In Kingsley Amis (1989) Richard Bradford warns the reader that "Amis is an 'experimental' writ...

SINCE THERE ARE all kinds of girlsnot all of them female there can be all kinds of difficulties with girls. Kingsley Amis knows all about them, and he's willing and able to tell you. That rakish fellow Patrick Standish had difficulties with...

As Pierre Boulez has often said, concert programme planning is an art in itself. But these days Boulez has the sense to let us guess at what the ideas behind his programmes may be. Take, for example, his pairing of Berg's Violin Concerto and...