The Letters of Kingsley Amis

The most eagerly awaited, and scandalously entertaining, collection of correspondence since The Larkin Letters (1992).

Throughout his life, Sir Kingsley Amis was a prolific, brilliant and outrageous correspondent. In his letters to friends such as Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest he was able to unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, and as a result the more than seven hundred letters contained in this volume -- the vast majority of them never seen in print before -- contain some of his wittiest and most acerbic writings.

The letters reveal Amis's youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his spectacularly successful first novel, Lucky Jim; his passionate love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about the vicissitudes of family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, and the subsequent souring of his relationship with his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth...