Kingsley Amis Essays

I want to find out if it's the way Kingsley Amis describes it in another of these pieces.Amis senior has somehow been persuaded to take part as a judge. Most of them mince around with their ridiculous model walks, but one impresses him.He truly convinced me.______________________________________Many readers will no doubt be surprised to hear this, but until a few minutes ago I was unaware that paraphrases of Hamlet are, in fact, readily available on the Internet.

If you compare this collection of lit crit and pop rumination to similar recent efforts by Updike, Hitchens, or even Amis' son Martin, you'll find it far more If anyone on staff is interested, I'd be happy to submit a scan of the dust jacket of my copy. It features six snapshots of a few of the figures Amis is concerned with in his essays, Jane Austen, Christopher Lee (the actor), Charles Dickens, DH Lawrence, Peter Cushing (the actor), and Ian Fleming.

If you compare this collection of lit crit and pop rumination to similar recent efforts by Updike, Hitchens, or even Amis' son Martin, you'll find it far more readable, if you're anything like me.

Though published in 1967, do these words remind you of anything occurring in November 2009?

"You cannot decide to have brotherhood; if you start trying to enforce it, you will before long find yourself enforcing something very different, and much worse than mere absence of brotherhood. I like that." ~Kingsley Amis, italics in original"What Became of Jane Austen" was actually the first book placed on my to-read shelf. Amis's critique of Jane Austen-Although he did allude to the famous bit about Austen spendin"What Became of Jane Austen" was actually the first book placed on my to-read shelf. Amis's critique of Jane Austen-Although he did allude to the famous bit about Austen spending too long on the unimportant and glossing over the important, the titular essay was all of four pages long.

After all, who would put up with all life’s humiliations—the abuse from superiors, the insults of arrogant men, the pangs of unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal system, the rudeness of people in office, and the mistreatment good people have to take from bad—when you could simply take out your knife and call it quits?

Who would choose to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life, unless they were afraid of something dreadful after death, the undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about without getting any answers from and which makes us stick to the evils we know rather than rush off to seek the ones we don’t?

His opening shot at Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is spot on in praising Austen as a writer while accurately analysing what is most annoying about this particular story.

One of his targets appears at least twice in this collection, which is religion, and in particular Christianity.

Indeed both the opening essay on Austen and the last column of the book tackle that target and he returns to that attack in several other of his writings beyond this collection.

As the sort of Christian he would particularly take issue with all I can say is that it is at least flattering for the faith that he so often takes such pains to have a go at it.