In later life he was a habitue of the Garrick Club in London

In later life he was a habitue of the Garrick Club, in London. He was appointed CBE in 1981, was granted the freedom of the City of London in 1989, and knighted in 1990. In many ways he became a pillar of the Establishment that he had once tilted at. He was an opinionated connoisseur of wine, and an unsurpassed observer of bar-room speech and behaviour. He took pride in the literary success of his son Martin, who occupies much the same key position among the British novelists who came of age in the 1970s as Kingsley did among those of the 1950s – a dynastic succession unprecedented in the annals of English literature. In spite of the differences of tone and ideology that divide them, it is a fascinating critical exercise to track the stylistic gene that unites these two novelists.It would be an understatement to say that Kingsley Amis enjoyed a drink.

The reader knows he is in for a treat from the first few pages describing Malcolm’s cautious negotiation of breakfast:He had not bitten anything with his front teeth since losing a top middle crown on a slice of liver-sausage six years earlier, and the right-hand side of his mouth was a no-go area, what with the hole in the lower lot where stuff was always apt to stick and a funny piece of gum that seemed to have got detached from something and waved about whenever it got the chance.Kingsley Amis’s second marriage broke up in 1983 and in later life he happily shared a house in Hampstead with his first wife, Hillie, and her second husband, Lord Kilmarnock – a twist in his biography that might have come from one of his own late novels. But Amis is in total command of his material and his unique narrative style. The best of them was The Old Devils, for which Amis was deservedly awarded the Booker Prize in 1986 This is another fictional study of old age. The setting in Amis’s old haunts in south Wales lends the book an affectionate, nostalgic glow which is deceptive; an appalling abyss of pain, despair and anxiety gradually opens up beneath the novel’s comic surface. Stanley and the Women caused particular offence perhaps because it is cunningly constructed to catch the unwary liberal reader in its narrative trap.

Amis’s distrust of the female psyche was evident, for those who had eyes to see, as early as Lucky Jim, in the characterisation of the hysterical and devious Margaret. But in the late Eighties he enjoyed a kind of second spring, producing in quick succession Stanley and the Women (1984), The Old Devils (1986), Difficulties with Girls (1988) and The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990). The first of these achieved some notoriety as a misogynist tract, and it was rumoured that a feminist cabal in the New York publishing world significantly delayed its publication in America. Both these novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.There followed something of a lull in Amis’s creativity. “I suppose”, says one of their young relatives to another in the course of a particularly joyless Christmas, “I suppose with luck we might get a couple of weeks between the last of them going and us being in their situation.” The brilliantly titled Jake’s Thing (1978) brought the same mordant scrutiny to bear on male impotence and sex therapy, often to wonderfully comic effect, though without the elegant economy of its predecessor. (A representative passage raises “the question why, if God wanted human beings to have religion, he did not simply give it to them, instead of arranging the world in one way and then sending someone along to explain that really the whole set-up was quite different”).Amis’s best novel after Take A Girl Like You was arguably Ending Up (1974), a black comic tale of a group of retired people failing to cope with the afflictions of old age. An essay boldly entitled “On Christ’s Nature” reveals an impressive familiarity with the New Testament, and a characteristic refusal to be awed.

In some of them he addressed himself to weighty philosophic and religious themes, such as the nature of evil.In spite of having had an essentially secular upbringing, Amis always took a lively, though pugnaciously sceptical, interest in Christian doctrine. Ten years later, however, he announced his conversion to Conservatism, in an essay entitled “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right”. Take A Girl Like You (1960) was a particularly interesting response to the first intimations of the Permissive Society.Because of the antiestablishment stance of the early novels, Amis was identified with the Left, and in 1957 he declared his allegiance to the Labour Party in a Fabian pamphlet. It was enormously liberating.Measured on a simple laugh-out-loud scale, Lucky Jim was probably the funniest novel Amis wrote, and for some readers his career was therefore downhill all the way. But in spite of his talent for comedy, Amis was, in the words of Larkin’s poem, always surprising in himself a hunger to be more serious, and in the novels that followed he combined amusing social satire with a thoughtful and sometimes uncomfortable investigation of the moral life, especially in the sexual sphere. Through the comedy of Jim’s private fantasies and accidental breaches of social decorum, Amis gave us, as it were, permission not to be overawed by the social and cultural codes of the class to which we had been elevated by education.

It became a bestseller and a cult book – not surprisingly, for it was a sublimely funny novel which also put its finger very accurately on certain changes which had taken place in post-war British culture and society. Although Amis himself belonged to a small elite of pre-war scholarship boys, he articulated through his hero, Jim Dixon, the feelings of a much larger number of people in the next generation (my own) who were products of the 1944 Education Act and the Welfare State. He settled down in that pleasant but deeply provincial seaside town to teach, write, and raise a family of three children, one of whom was called Martin. From this congenial but humdrum and materially somewhat pinched existence, Amis was catapulted to fame by the publication of Lucky Jim (dedicated to Larkin) in January 1954. In this department he was always somewhat overshadowed by Larkin, to whom he paid the homage of imitation, but he was an excellent exponent of light verse, especially of a satirical and ribald kind.Amis married Hilary Bardwell in 1948, and the following year took up a post as lecturer in English Literature at the University College of Wales, Swansea.