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The term New Oxford Wits was applied, around 1980, to a group of young English writers who had been at the University of Oxford in the 1970s.[ citation needed ] It alludes to the Oxford Wits of the 1920s. Those supposed to be in the New Oxford Wits were Martin Amis, [1] Julian Barnes, Tina Brown, James Fenton, Ian Hamilton and Craig Raine.
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). His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He is the father of the novelist Martin Amis. In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. 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 has been listed for the Booker Prize twice. Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working- and middle-class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading figures included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis; other popular figures included John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and John Wain. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer in order to promote Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young Man was published in 1951.
John Lyly was an English writer, dramatist, courtier, and parliamentarian. He was best known during his lifetime for his two books Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and its sequel Euphues and His England (1580), but perhaps best remembered now for his plays. Lyly's distinctive and much imitated literary style, named after the title character of his two books, is known as euphuism.
Wit is a form of intelligent humour, the ability to say or write things that are clever and usually funny. Someone witty is a person who is skilled at making clever and funny remarks. Forms of wit include the quip, repartee, and wisecrack.
John Barrington Wain CBE was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group known as "The Movement". He worked for most of his life as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio.
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by D. J. Enright, is a poetry anthology from 1980, published by Oxford University Press. It might be considered one of the "last words" from a founder-member of The Movement, with its comments in the Introduction still in an anti-romantic vein, and that "the editor remains unpersuaded that wit is necessarily evasive in some shabby way or emotionally lowering". It was reissued in 1995 under the title Oxford Book of Verse 1945–1980 (ISBN 0-19-283188-7).
The Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) is located near Cambridge, UK and is home to a number of the largest and most advanced aperture synthesis radio telescopes in the world, including the One-Mile Telescope, 5-km Ryle Telescope, and the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager. It was founded by the University of Cambridge and is part of the Cambridge University, Cavendish Laboratories, Astrophysics Department.
The Oxford Wits, a term coined later, were an identifiable group of literary and intellectual aesthetes and dandies, present as undergraduates at the University of Oxford in England in the first half of the 1920s.
Martian poetry was a minor movement in British poetry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which everyday things and human behaviour are described in a strange way, as if by a visiting Martian who does not understand them. Poets most closely associated with it are Craig Raine and Christopher Reid.
General Miguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship over Spain began with a coup on 13 September 1923 and ended with his resignation on 28 January 1930. It took place during the wider reign of King Alfonso XIII. In establishing his dictatorship, Primo de Rivera ousted the liberal government led by Prime Minister Manuel García Prieto and initially gained the support of King Alfonso XIII and the army. During the Military Directory (1923–1925), the dictatorship created the official party of the regime, the Unión Patriótica (UP). It also censored the Spanish press and worked to eliminate separatism in Catalonia. Under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, Spain won the Rif War, where Spanish forces fought Riffian tribes in Morocco.
Zachary Leader is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and did graduate work at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard University, where he was awarded a PhD in English in 1977. Although born and raised in the U.S. he has lived for over forty years in the U.K., and has dual British and American citizenship. His best-known works are The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2001), The Life of Kingsley Amis (2007), a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 (2015), which was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize in the U.K. The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965 to 2005 was published in 2018. He has written and edited a dozen books, including both volumes of the Saul Bellow biography, and is General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series published by OUP. A recipient of Guggenheim, Whiting, Huntington, Leverhulme and British Academy Fellowships, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The Rachel Papers is Martin Amis's first novel, published in 1973 by Jonathan Cape.
Julian Medforth Budden was a British opera scholar, radio producer and broadcaster. He is particularly known for his three volumes on the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, a single-volume biography in 1982 and a single-volume work on Giacomo Puccini and his operas in 2002. He is also the author of numerous entries in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Dead Babies is Martin Amis's second novel, published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape. It was published in paperback as Dark Secrets. Amis's second novel—a parody of Agatha Christie's country-house mysteries—takes place over a single weekend at a manor called Appleseed Rectory. In 2000, the book was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Paul Bettany and Olivia Williams. In 2001, BBC critic David Wood wrote "Amis's second novel ranks among his most incendiary with its mordant wit, black comedy, and sense of the violently absurd."
The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986) is a collection of non-fiction essays on the subject of America, by the British novelist Martin Amis.
Success is Martin Amis's third novel, published in 1978 by Jonathan Cape.
Hitch-22: A Memoir is a memoir written by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.
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.
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