Kingsley Amis

Lucky Jim tells the story of Jim Dixon, who has accidentally found himself in a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England', and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's...

New edition of the Penguin Essential of the best satire ever written. 'His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.' Jim Dixon has a terrible...

The complete collection of Kingsley Amis's poems, as witty, scabrous and bracing as his celebrated novels. Although best known for his comic novels, Kingsley Amis wrote poetry throughout his career. Collected Poems spans subjects from nature and cricket to love, ageing and literature, brimming with his characteristic wit and irreverence, yet full of compassion. 'The Last War' brings home the...

Of all the choristers at the Cathedral Basilica of St George, he is the angel—the one whose voice could only have been made in heaven. In every other respect, Hubert is utterly ordinary: a nice, rather timid ten-year-old boy. The year is 1976, but by bold Amisian sleight-of-hand, the England of The Alteration has become a disconcerting, quasi-medieval land in...

Robin Davies is both a shrewd observer and an energetic actor in a drama that takes him from school to Oxford. With him, we live through all the pangs of a pre-war adolescence in South London, and on through his rites of passage to adulthood, involving rebellion, self-discovery, sex, seduction, and commitment. You Can't Do Both is classic Amis—brilliantly funny,...

Kingsley Amis's memoirs are filled with anecdotes, experiences and portraits of famous friends, family and acquaintances. From his childhood days to Oxford and army life, his travels abroad and his years as a novelist, Memoirs offers insights into a unique literary life.

A powerful read brought back to life; surprising, honest and witty at every turn. Jake's Thing centres on Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, in pursuit of his lost libido. He heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full...

Lunch at Scott's, a quiet game of golf, a routine social call on his chief M—James Bond's life has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency, until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped and all of his house staff savagely murdered. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island, where the malign Colonel Sun...