Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television 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).
Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). He came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize. Amis was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Timothy Sydney Robert Hardy was an English actor who had a long career in theatre, film and television. He began his career as a classical actor and later earned widespread recognition for roles such as Siegfried Farnon in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small, Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter film series and Winston Churchill in several productions, beginning with the Southern Television series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years. He was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Actor for All Creatures Great and Small in 1980 and Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years in 1982. Aside from acting, Hardy was an acknowledged expert on the medieval English longbow and wrote two books on the subject.
Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet and writer Philip Larkin. In 1943, towards the end of his time as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and critical commentary under that name, including homoerotic stories that parody the style of popular writers of contemporary girls' school fiction.
The James Bond Dossier (1965), by Kingsley Amis, is a critical analysis of the James Bond novels. Amis dedicated the book to friend and background collaborator, the poet and historian Robert Conquest. Later, after Ian Fleming's death, Amis was commissioned as the first continuation novelist for the James Bond novel series, writing Colonel Sun (1968) under the pseudonym Robert Markham. The James Bond Dossier was the first, formal, literary study of the James Bond character. More recent studies of Fleming's secret agent and his world include The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen (2001), by the historian Jeremy Black.
A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s. The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is often quoted as the earliest example, although in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Elaine Showalter discusses C. P. Snow's The Masters, of the previous year, and several earlier novels have an academic setting and the same characteristics, such as Willa Cather's The Professor's House of 1925; Régis Messac's Smith Conundrum, first published between 1928 and 1931; and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night of 1935.
The phrase "said the actress to the bishop" is a colloquial British exclamation, offering humour by serving as a punch line that exposes an unintended double entendre. An equivalent phrase in North America is "that's what she said". The versatility of such phrases, and their popularity, lead some to consider them clichéd.
Throughout the life of the poet Philip Larkin, multiple women had important roles which were significant influences on his poetry. Since Larkin's death in 1985, biographers have highlighted the importance of female relationships on Larkin: when Andrew Motion's biography was serialised in The Independent in 1993, the second installment of extracts was dedicated to the topic. In 1999, Ben Brown's play Larkin with Women dramatised Larkin's relationships with three of his lovers, and more recently writers such as Martin Amis, continued to comment on this subject.
Lucky Jim is a 1957 British comedy film directed by John Boulting and starring Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas and Hugh Griffith. It is an adaptation of the 1954 novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.
Arguably: Essays is a 2011 book by Christopher Hitchens, comprising 107 essays on a variety of political and cultural topics. These essays were previously published in The Atlantic, City Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Newsweek, New Statesman, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. Arguably also includes introductions that Hitchens wrote for new editions of several classic texts, such as Animal Farm and Our Man in Havana. Critics' reviews of the collection were largely positive.
Lemmons, also known as Gladsmuir and Gladsmuir House, was the home of novelists Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) and Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) on the south side of Hadley Common, Barnet, on the border of north London and Hertfordshire.
I Like It Here is a novel by the English writer Kingsley Amis, first published in 1958 by Victor Gollancz.
The Anti-Death League is a 1966 novel by English author Kingsley Amis (1922–1995). Set in England, it follows the lives of characters working in and around a fictional British Army camp where a secret weapon is being tested.
The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim is a British television sitcom which first aired on BBC 2 in 1982. It is inspired by the 1954 novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, updated to the Swinging Sixties. It was intended as a sequel to the 1967 series Further Adventures of Lucky Jim also written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, which had starred Keith Barron in the title role.
Lucky Jim is a 2003 British television comedy film directed by Robin Sheppard and starring Stephen Tompkinson, Robert Hardy and Keeley Hawes. It is an adaptation of the 1954 novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.
Further Adventures of Lucky Jim or The New Adventures of Lucky Jim is a comedy television series which first aired on BBC 1 in 1967. Inspired by the novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, it updates the story from the early 1950s of the novel to mid-1960s Swinging London. It stars Keith Barron as the young university lecturer Jim Dixon. The scriptwriters wrote a belated sequel The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim starring Enn Reitel in 1982.
Inside Story is an autobiographical novel by the English author Martin Amis, published in 2020. It was Amis' final novel to be published before his death in 2023.
The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017 is a 2017 collection of non-fiction essays and criticism by the British author Martin Amis. It was his eighth nonfiction book and the final collection published during his lifetime.
Hilary Kilmarnock, Lady Kilmarnock, known as Hilly, was the first wife of Kingsley Amis and the mother of Martin Amis. When her third husband, Alistair Boyd, became Chief of Clan Boyd and 7th Baron Kilmarnock, she became Lady Kilmarnock.
