Centenary appreciation …

… Amis at 100: a master satirist without honour | Alexander Larman | The Critic Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Oxford academic Julian Thompson, an expert on Amis’s work, once remarked that he was mystified how “that consummate literary professional Kingsley Amis has gone down in history as a drunken, women-hating bigot”. In his centenary year, the man once regarded as the greatest comic novelist since Evelyn Waugh is now seen as little more than a joke himself, a Blimpish caricature of a bon viveur whose major books are little more than reactionary relics of a (thankfully) bygone age, and whose minor works are, at best, blessedly forgotten squibs and, at worst, vile indicators of personal failings that would, in our more enlightened era, have immediately led to Amis’s cancellation.