Amis, Sir Kingsley

novelist and poet, achieved popular success with his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), whose hero, lower‐middle‐class radical lecturer Jim Dixon was hailed as an ‘Angry Young Man’. Its setting in a provincial university was also indicative of a new development in fiction (see Cooper, W., Larkin, Braine), a movement that Amis confirmed in That Uncertain Feeling (1955) and Take a Girl Like You (1960). I Like it Here (1958), a novel set in Portugal, displays Amis's deliberate cultivation, for comic effect, of a prejudiced and philistine pose which was to harden into an increasingly conservative and hostile view of contemporary life and manners. He is best known for satiric comedy: One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978), Stanley and the Women (1984), The Old Devils (Booker Prize, 1986), Difficulties With Girls (1988), and You Can't Do Both (1994). Amis also successfully attempted many other genres. The Anti‐Death League (1966), while in some respects offering the satisfaction of a conventional spy story, is a serious protest against God's inhumanity to man. The Green Man (1969) is a novel of the supernatural, The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) an imitation of a classic detective story. Amis's enthusiasm for I. Fleming's work expressed itself in The James Bond Dossier (1965) and Colonel Sun (1968), published under the pseudonym of Robert Markham. A volume of memoirs appeared in 1991 and his last novel, The Biographer's Moustache, in 1995. Among other anthologies he edited The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), and his Collected Poems 1944–1979 appeared in 1979.