Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis CBE (16 April 1922 – 22
Sir
October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and
teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of Kingsley Amis
poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television CBE
scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is
best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim
(1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up
(1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils
(1986).[1]
His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest
English comic novelist of the second half of the
twentieth century". In 2008, The Times ranked him
ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since
1945.[2] He was the father of the novelist Martin Amis.
Life and career
Amis in 1970
Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham,
Born Kingsley William Amis
south London, the only child of William Robert Amis
16 April 1922
(1889–1963), a clerk—"quite an important one, fluent Clapham, London,
in Spanish and responsible for exporting mustard to England
South America"—for the mustard manufacturer Died 22 October 1995 (aged 73)
Colman's in the City of London,[3] and his wife Rosa London, England
Annie (née Lucas).[4][5] The Amis grandparents were Occupation Novelist · poet · critic ·
wealthy. William Amis's father, the glass merchant
teacher
Joseph James Amis, owned a mansion called
Alma mater St John's College, Oxford
Barchester at Purley, then part of Surrey. Amis
considered J. J. Amis—always called "Pater" or Period 1947–1995
"Dadda"—"a jokey, excitable, silly little man", whom Genre Fiction, fictional prose
he "disliked and was repelled by".[6] Literary Angry young men
movement
His wife Julia "was a large, dreadful, hairy-faced Spouse Hilary Ann Bardwell
(m. 1948; div. 1965)
creature ... whom [Amis] loathed and feared". His
mother's parents lived at Camberwell. Her father Elizabeth Jane Howard
(m. 1965; div. 1983)
George was an enthusiastic collector of books and
Baptist chapel organist who was employed at a Brixton Children Philip Amis
gentleman's outfitters as a tailor's assistant[7] and was Martin Amis
"the only grandparent [Amis] cared for". Amis hoped Sally Amis
to inherit much of his grandfather's library, but his
grandmother Jemima—whom Amis already disliked for her habit of mocking her husband when he read
his favourite passages to Amis, making "faces and gestures at him while his head was lowered to the
page"[7]—permitted him to take only five volumes, on condition he wrote "from his grandfather's
collection" on the flyleaf of each.[6]
Amis was raised at Norbury—in his later estimation "not really a place. It's an expression on a map ...
really I should say I came from Norbury station."[8] Having been educated first at St Hilda's, an
"undistinguished, long-vanished local school ... an independent girls' school of the kind which also took
small boys, before they became pubescent and dangerous", he then moved to nearby Norbury College.[9]
In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Amis (like his father before him) won a
scholarship to the City of London School.[10] In April 1941, after his first year, he was admitted on a
scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he read English. There he met Philip Larkin, with whom
he formed the most important friendship of his life.[11]
In June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.[11] He broke with communism in 1956,
in view of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech "On the Cult of
Personality and Its Consequences".[12] In July 1942, he was called up for national service and served in
the Royal Corps of Signals. He returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree.[13] Although
he worked hard and earned a first in English in 1947, he had decided by then to give much of his time to
writing.
In 1946 he met Hilary Bardwell. They married in 1948 after she became pregnant with their first child,
Philip. Amis initially arranged for her to have a back-street abortion, but changed his mind, fearing for
her safety. He was a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961.[14] Two
other children followed: Martin[15] in August 1949 and Sally in January 1954.
Days after Sally's birth, Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, was published to great acclaim. Critics felt it had
caught the flavour of Britain in the 1950s and ushered in a new style of fiction.[16] By 1972, its
impressive sales in Britain had been matched by 1.25 million paperback copies sold in the United States.
It was translated into 20 languages, including Polish, Hebrew, Korean, and Serbo-Croat.[17] The novel
won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis became one of the writers known as the Angry
Young Men. Lucky Jim was among the first British campus novels, setting a precedent for later
generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson. As a
poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.
In 1958–1959 Amis made the first of two visits to the United States, as visiting fellow in creative writing
at Princeton University and a visiting lecturer in other north-eastern universities. On returning to Britain,
he fell into a rut, and he began looking for another post. After 13 years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow
of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1961, but regretted the move within a year, finding Cambridge an academic
and social disappointment. He resigned in 1963, intent on moving to Majorca, although he actually
moved no further than London.[18][19]
In 1963, Hilary discovered that Amis was having an affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Hilary and Amis separated in August and he went to live with Howard, divorcing Hilary and marrying
Howard in 1965. In 1968 he moved with Howard to Lemmons, a house in Barnet, north London. She and
Amis divorced in 1983.
In his last years, Amis shared a house with Hilary and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron
Kilmarnock. Martin's memoir Experience contains much about the life, charm and decline of his father.
Amis was knighted in 1990. In August 1995 he fell, following a suspected stroke. After apparently
recovering, he worsened and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London.[20][21] He was
cremated and his ashes laid to rest at Golders Green Crematorium.
Literary work
Amis is widely known as a comic novelist of life in mid- to late-20th-century Britain, but his literary
work covered many genres: poetry, essays, criticism, short stories, food and drink, anthologies, and
several novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery. His career initially developed in an inverse
pattern to that of his close friend Philip Larkin. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published
two novels; Amis originally sought to be a poet and turned to novels only after publishing several
volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry in a straightforward, accessible style
that often masks a nuance of thought.
Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), satirises the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university
through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history. It was widely perceived as part of the Angry
Young Men movement of the 1950s, in reacting against stultification of conventional British life,
although Amis never encouraged this interpretation. Amis's other novels of the 1950s and early 1960s
likewise depict contemporary situations drawn from his experience.
That Uncertain Feeling (1955) features a young provincial librarian (perhaps with an eye to Larkin
working as a librarian in Hull) and his temptation to adultery. I Like It Here (1958) takes a contemptuous
view of "abroad", after Amis's own travels on the Continent with a young family. Take a Girl Like You
(1960) steps away from the immediately autobiographical, but remains grounded in the concerns of sex
and love in ordinary modern life, tracing a young schoolmaster's courtship and ultimate seduction of the
heroine.
With The Anti-Death League (1966), Amis begins to show some of the experimentation—in content, if
not style—that marked much of his work in the 1960s and 1970s. His departure from the strict realism of
his early comedic novels is not so abrupt as it might first appear. He had been avidly reading science
fiction since a boy and developed that interest in the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958, while visiting
Princeton University. These were published that year as New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction,
giving a serious yet light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society.
Amis was especially keen on the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and in New
Maps of Hell coined the term "comic inferno" to describe a type of humorous dystopia exemplified by the
work of Robert Sheckley. He further displayed his devotion to the genre in editing, with the Sovietologist
Robert Conquest, the science-fiction anthology series Spectrum I–V, which drew heavily upon 1950s
numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.
Though not explicitly science fiction, The Anti-Death League takes liberties with reality not found in
Amis's earlier novels. It introduces a speculative bent that continued to develop in others of his genre
novels, such as The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration (1976) (alternative history).
Much of this speculation concerned the improbability of the existence of any benevolent deity involved in
human affairs.
In The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, The Alteration and elsewhere, including poems such as "The
Huge Artifice: an interim assessment" and "New Approach Needed", Amis showed frustration with a God
who could lace the world with cruelty and injustice, and championed the preservation of ordinary human
happiness—in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure—against the demands of any cosmological
scheme. Amis's religious views appear in a response reported in his Memoirs. To the Russian poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko's question, "You atheist?", Amis replied, "It's more that I hate Him."
During this time, Amis had not turned completely away from the comedic realism of Lucky Jim and Take
a Girl Like You. I Want It Now (1968) and Girl, 20 (1971) both depict the "swinging" atmosphere of late-
1960s London, in which Amis certainly participated, though neither book is strictly autobiographical.
Girl, 20, for instance, is set in the world of classical (and pop) music, in which Amis had no part. The
book's noticeable command of music terminology and opinion shows Amis's amateur devotion to music
and almost journalistic capacity to explore a subject that interested him. That intelligence is similarly
displayed in the ecclesiastical matters in The Alteration; Amis was neither a Roman Catholic nor a
devotee of any church.
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Amis regularly produced essays and criticism, principally for
periodical publication. Some were collected in 1968 into What Became of Jane Austen? and Other
Essays, in which Amis's wit and literary and social opinions were displayed on books such as Colin
Wilson's The Outsider (panned), Iris Murdoch's début novel Under the Net (praised), and William
Empson's Milton's God (inclined to agreement). Amis's opinions on books and people tended to appear,
and often were, conservative, and yet, as the title essay of the collection shows, he was not merely
reverent of "the classics" and of traditional morals, but more disposed to exercise his own rather
independent judgement in all things.
Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which he admired, in the late 1960s,
when he began composing critical works connected with Bond, either under a pseudonym or uncredited.
In 1965, he wrote the popular James Bond Dossier under his own name. The same year, he wrote The
Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated
spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", Tanner being M's chief of staff in many of
Fleming's novels. In 1968 Amis wrote Colonel Sun, which was published under the pseudonym "Robert
Markham".
Amis's literary style and tone changed significantly after 1970, with the possible exception of The Old
Devils, a Booker Prize winner. Several critics found him old-fashioned and misogynistic. His Stanley and
the Women, an exploration of social sanity, could be said to instance these traits. Others said that his
output lacked his earlier work's humanity, wit and compassion.
This period also saw Amis as an anthologist, displaying a wide knowledge of all kinds of English poetry.
The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), which he edited, was a revision of an original volume done
by W. H. Auden. Amis took it in a markedly new direction: Auden had interpreted light verse to include
"low" verse of working-class or lower-class origin, regardless of subject matter, while Amis defined light
verse as essentially light in tone, though not necessarily simple in composition. The Amis Anthology
(1988), a personal selection of his favourite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspaper, in
which he selected a poem a day and gave it a brief introduction.[22]
Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, for Ending Up (1974) and Jake's Thing (1978),
and finally, as prizewinner, for The Old Devils in 1986.[23]
In 2008, The Times ranked Amis 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.[24][25]
Personal life
Political views
As a young man at Oxford, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and left it in 1956.[26][27]
He later described this stage of his political life as "the callow Marxist phase that seemed almost
compulsory in Oxford".[28] Amis remained nominally on the political left for some time after the war,
declaring in the 1950s that he would always vote for the Labour Party.[29]
Amis eventually moved further to the political right, a development he discussed in the essay "Why
Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967); his conservatism and anti-communism can be seen in works like the
dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).[30] In 1967, Amis, Robert Conquest, John Braine, and
several other authors signed a letter to The Times entitled "Backing for U.S. Policies in Vietnam",
supporting the US government in the Vietnam War.[31] He spoke at the Adam Smith Institute, arguing
against government subsidy to the arts.[32]
Character
By his own admission and according to his biographers, Amis was a serial adulterer for much of his life.
This was a major contributory factor in the breakdown of his first marriage. A famous photograph of a
sleeping Amis on a Yugoslav beach shows the slogan (written in lipstick by wife Hilary) on his back "1
Fat Englishman—I fuck anything."[33]
In one memoir, Amis wrote, "Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of
the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time".[34] He suggests this reflects a naïve
tendency in readers to apply the behaviour of his characters to himself. He enjoyed drink and spent a
good deal of time in pubs. Hilary Rubinstein, who accepted Lucky Jim for Victor Gollancz, commented,
"I doubted whether Jim Dixon would have gone to the pub and drunk ten pints of beer.... I didn't know
Kingsley very well, you see."[35]
Clive James commented: "All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the Garrick
Club even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to
the taxi."[36] But Amis was adamant that inspiration did not come from a bottle: "Whatever part drink
may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work."[34]
This matched a disciplined approach to writing. For "many years" Amis imposed a rigorous daily
schedule on himself, segregating writing and drink. Mornings were spent on writing, with a minimum
daily output of 500 words.[37] Drinking began about lunchtime, when this had been achieved. Such self-
discipline was essential to Amis's prodigious output.
Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a
way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself
deliberately.... It seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own
conduct."[36] His friend Christopher Hitchens said: "The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of
his wit and charm as well as of his health."[38]
Antisemitism
Amis had an unclear relationship with antisemitism, which he sometimes expressed but also claimed to
dislike.[39] He occasionally speculated on the commonly advanced Jewish stereotypes. Antisemitism was
sometimes present in his conversations and letters to friends and associates, such as "The great Jewish
vice is glibness, fluency ... also possibly just bullshit, as in Marx, Freud, Marcuse", or "Chaplin [who was
not Jewish] is a horse's arse. He's a Jeeeew you see, like the Marx Brothers, like Danny Kaye." It is a
minor theme in his Stanley and the Women novel about a paranoid schizophrenic. As for the cultural
complexion of the United States, Amis had this to say: "I've finally worked out why I don't like
Americans ... . Because everyone there is either a Jew or a hick." Amis himself described his antisemitism
as "very mild".[40]
Family
Amis's first, 15-year marriage was to Hilary Bardwell,[41] the daughter of a civil servant,[42] by whom he
had two sons and one daughter: Philip Amis, a graphics designer;[42] Martin Amis, a novelist who died in
2023;[43] and Sally Amis, who died in 2000.
Amis was married a second time, to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard from 1965 to 1983, with whom
he had no children. At the end of that marriage, he went to live with his former wife Hilary and her third
husband, in a deal brokered by their two sons Philip and Martin to ensure he could be cared for until his
death.[44]
Partial bibliography
Poetry
1947 Bright November
1953 A Frame of Mind
1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits
1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946–1956
1962 The Evans County
1968 A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967
1979 Collected Poems 1944–78
Fiction
Novels
c. 1948 The Legacy (unpublished)
1954 Lucky Jim
1955 That Uncertain Feeling
1958 I Like It Here
1960 Take a Girl Like You
1963 One Fat Englishman
1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest)
1966 The Anti-Death League
1968 Colonel Sun: a James Bond Adventure (pseud. Robert Markham)
1968 I Want It Now
1969 The Green Man
1971 Girl, 20
1973 The Riverside Villas Murder
1974 Ending Up
1975 The Crime of the Century
1976 The Alteration
1978 Jake's Thing
1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek
1984 Stanley and the Women
1986 The Old Devils
1988 Difficulties with Girls
1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill
1991 We Are All Guilty
1992 The Russian Girl
1994 You Can't Do Both
1995 The Biographer's Moustache
c. 1995 Black and White (unfinished)[45]
Short fiction collections
1962 My Enemy's Enemy
1980 Collected Short Stories
1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories
Other short fiction
1960 "Hemingway in Space" (short story), Punch, December 1960
Non-fiction
1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals (http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:zac634xij), a
Fabian Society pamphlet
1960 New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction
1965 The James Bond Dossier
1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (pseud. Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner)
1970 What Became of Jane Austen?, and Other Questions
1972 On Drink
1974 Rudyard Kipling and His World
1983 Everyday Drinking
1984 How's Your Glass?
1990 The Amis Collection
1991 Memoirs
1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (name in part a pun as he was
sometimes called "Kingers" or "The King" by friends and family, as told by his son Martin in
his memoir Experience)
2001 The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Edited by Zachary Leader
2008 Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, Introduction by Christopher Hitchens
(an omnibus edition of On Drink, Everyday Drinking and How's Your Glass?)
Editor
1961–66 Spectrum anthology series (ed. with Robert Conquest)(Five volumes)
1978 The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (ed.)
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction (ed.)
Biography portal
Poetry portal
References
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3. Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, Neil Powell, Pan Macmillan, 2012, p. 3
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16. Malcolm Bradbury, 1989, p. 205; Ritchie, 1988, p. 64.
17. Jacobs, 1995, p. 162.
18. Memoirs, "Cambridge".
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20. "Sir Kingsley Amis Dies; British Novelist and Poet", Washington Post, 23 October 1995.
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22. Fussell, The Anti-Egotist.
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d_entertainment/books/article3127837.ece) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2011042
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he-times-50-greatest-british-writers-since-1945). Archived from the original (http://www.listso
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26. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread (2002).
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s://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/28/mi5-kept-tabs-young-communist-kingsley-amis/).
The Telegraph. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20190121121758/https://www.telegra
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29. Leader, 2006, p. 366.
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ascherson/red-souls) 20 June 2019 at the Wayback Machine, London Review of Books, Vol.
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33. Leader 2006, opposite p. 565.
34. Memoirs: "Booze".
35. Quoted in Bradford, Chapter 5.
36. Clive James, "Kingsley without the women", Times Literary Supplement, 2 February 2007.
37. Jacobs, 1995, pp. 6 and 17.
38. Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking, New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008, editor's introduction.
39. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford
University Press, 2010, pp. 357–358.
40. Julius, p. 358.
41. Hilary Amis was later wife to the classicist D. R. Shackleton Bailey (married 1967; divorced
1975) and the late Lord Kilmarnock (married 1977; died 19 March 2009). She had a son
James or Jaime, born still out of wedlock, by her third husband (often called her second
husband by the media), who was therefore unable to inherit his father's peerage.
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chive.org/web/20220707015719/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/martin-
amis-the-man-who-fell-to-earth-231583.html) 7 July 2022 at the Wayback Machine, The
Independent, 13 May 2000.
44. Jacobs, Eric (23 October 1995). "Sir Kingsley Amis obituary: From angry young man to old
devil" (https://www.theguardian.com/books/1995/oct/23/fiction.kingsleyamis). The Guardian.
Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20231023170545/https://www.theguardian.com/book
s/1995/oct/23/fiction.kingsleyamis) from the original on 23 October 2023. Retrieved 21 May
2020.
45. Leader 2006, pp. 778–779.
Sources
Amis, Kingsley (1992). Kingsley Amis: Memoirs. Penguin.
Amis, Kingsley (2000). Leader, Zachary (ed.). The Letters of Kingsley Amis. HarperCollins.
ISBN 0-00-257095-5.
Bradbury, Malcolm (1989). No, Not Bloomsbury. Arena. ISBN 0-09-954410-5.
Bradford, Richard (2001). Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (https://archive.org/details/lu
ckyhimlifeofk00brad). Peter Owen. ISBN 0-7206-1117-2.
Fussell, Paul (1994). The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. Oxford UP.
Jacobs, Eric (1995). Kingsley Amis, a Biography (https://archive.org/details/kingsleyamisbio
g0000jaco). Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-59072-6.
Leader, Zachary (2006). The Life of Kingsley Amis. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-06227-1.
Powell, Neil (2008). Amis & Son – Two literary generations (https://archive.org/details/amiss
ontwolitera0000powe_k1s0). Pan Macmillan. ISBN 9781405054621.
Ritchie, Harry (1988). Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959 (htt
ps://archive.org/details/successstoriesli0000ritc). Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-14764-X.
Kingsley Amis's Troublesome Fun, Michael Dirda. The Chronicle of Higher Education 22
June 2007. B9-B11.
Amis, Martin (2002). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (https://archive.org/d
etails/kobadreadlaughte00amis). Talk Miramax Books. ISBN 978-1400032204.
External links
Kingsley Amis (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Kingsley_Amis) at the Internet
Speculative Fiction Database
"Kingsley Amis in the Great Tradition and in Our Time," (https://web.archive.org/web/200905
12174918/http://www.williams.edu/English/faculty/rbell/scholarship-and-criticism/AmisIntro.h
tml) by Robert H. Bell, Williams College. Introduction to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis,
ed. Robert H. Bell, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998.
Guardian Books "Author Page" (http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,-5,00.ht
ml), with profile and links to further articles.
Michael Barber (Winter 1975). "Kingsley Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 59" (http://www.thepari
sreview.org/interviews/3772/the-art-of-fiction-no-59-kingsley-amis). The Paris Review.
Winter 1975 (64).
"The Serious Comedian" (https://web.archive.org/web/20081207110610/http://www.prospect
-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?search_term=chatfield&id=8249), by Tom Chatfield,
Prospect, a review of Zachary Leader's biography.
"The old devil" (http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-old-devil-2606) – article on
Amis by Mark Steyn in The New Criterion
The Amis Inheritance (https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22amises.t.html?_r=1
&oref=slogin)—Profile on Martin and Kingsley Amis by Charles McGrath from New York
Times Magazine (22 April 2007).
Kingsley Amis Collection (http://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead/00007.
xml&query=amis&query-join=and) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20130116084425/
http://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead%2F00007.xml&query=amis&qu
ery-join=and) 16 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine at the Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas at Austin.
Kingsley Amis (http://www.sfwa.org/hidden-pages/estates-contact-information/) Literary
Estate
Portraits of Kingsley Amis (https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?LinkID=m
p05004) at the National Portrait Gallery, London
"Archival material relating to Kingsley Amis" (https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/detail
s/c/F32614). UK National Archives.
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