Let us first start with the name of the author of the book in question. "Kingsley Amis", so snotty, so upper-crust and blue blooded...so apropros! Who else would you want to tell you in grand meticulous detail how much you (you meaning the American, you meaning myself as well) butcher the King's English. I adore this book I would give it 5 stars but there are moments when Kingsley (to be said through clenched teeth) meanders a bit and becomes, dare I say it? TOO WORDY. Overall, 4 1/2 stars just for the sheer snottiness of it! Bravo!

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Are you disinterested or uninterested? When do you say alternately or should it be alternatively? These are words we hear everyday; but they are often confused and misused, even in the mainstream media. Help is at hand. The famous English author Kingsley Amis's last book The King's English will provide professional writers and those who care about their language, expert guidance in the usage of English.

Amis is best known for his novels such as Lucky Jim and the Old Devils, but he was also a skilled observer and commentator on late 20th Century life and language. Amis died in 1995, with this book being published posthumously, two years later.

In this book, he takes us from the classic formalism of old-school academic scholars with their groundings in Latin and Greek, through to the street-wise pop-media of the contemporary world. He bridges the gap between the rigorous, proscribed rules of the original 1926 classic H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage and the modern, pragmatic world where English is recognised as the global language. Despite being an Englishman, Amis acknowledged the ascendancy and the practical "correctness" of American English.

Amis in his book is very careful not to be too pedantic with his comments. In his entry on the pronunciation of kilometre, he argues against the common practice of stressing the second syllable and therefore making it sound like a device to measure items grouped in thousands. Amis assures us such a device once existed, but he concludes "not many people know that, or would care if they did."

Amis has fun criticising - and gently mocking - fashionable trends in writing, particularly in the field of newspaper journalism. In his entry on headlines, Amis gives examples of sub-editors stringing together three or more nouns to make a headline, such as, SCHOOL COACH CRASH DRAMA. He also criticises the journalistic trick of overloading descriptions in one sentence, which he calls the "gorged-snake construction."

Political abuse of the language is also put under the Amis spotlight. How often do we hear politicians "refuting", when all they are doing is denying, and not proving the falsity of the allegation, which is what the word really means?

The King's English is not an exhaustive guide to language use, but anybody who makes a living from writing or takes other people's writing seriously will want to keep a copy of this book close by their dictionary. Should we be implying or inferring this? Either way, this book is inspirational, amusing as well as instructive.

This is not in all seriousness a guide to usage. It's more like Amis's personal opinion piece, or list of pet peeves. His criticism cuts both ways, searing both those who take liberties with language, and those who are overly stuffed-shirt about using "whom" or saying "it is I." The closest thing to this among American writers would be William Safire, with a dash of Dave Barry. Amis is deadly funny, with a certain snootiness and condescension that are simultaneously repugnant and heroic.

This book shouldn't REALLY be your usage guide. Used as one, it would leave you feeling befuddled, and perhaps belittled. But it reads a bit like a usage guide, with an alphabetical list of topics for Amis's rants, e.g., "genteelisms," "whom," "get," etc. With insults freely being applied to people who speak in certain ways, however, it is more like a collection of Amis's opinions, to be used in conjunction with a real usage guide (as Amis admits in the introduction).

I am giving this book 5 stars because I am a language pedant, and find this stuff extremely entertaining. I read through it excitedly in one sitting; it's fascinating to me to find out what grammar points irk other language pedants. If you are not a language pedant, however, you may be bored by this book.

I had to have this one - an intersection of two writers I've admired for some time. Fussel is probably the ideal person to write such an appraisal. As mentioned above, the lack of critical theoryspeak is most welcome. The interpretation of Amis as a moral satirist (which isn't a category that you see very much) provides a useful key to most of his work (fiction, poetry, and prose alike.) If you're a fan of the work, you'll enjoy this - it's like having a chance to sit down across from an intelligent, perceptive reader who likes the same things you do.

"For all the sometimes rowdy comedy attending Amis's depictions of meanness, his understanding of its psychology is complicated and serious. It is, if funny, also immoral, so little and minimal, practiced by wee men only. And it betrays neurosis, implying constant "paranoid" watchfulness lest one be had. It keeps one on a constant stretch of attentive calculation, and this finally becomes a substitute for thought, as well as replacing an objective interest in things outside oneself."

"I feel STRETCHED", Bilbo Baggins after having the One Ring for a while.

Amis's letters are a lot of fun, as you might expect. Amis is often as outraged and funny as in his best fiction (especially in the letters to Larkin). Often in literary appraisals he is acute, and he always seems true to something in himself, so that even when one disagrees--i. e., T. S. Eliot is not simply a pretentious bore--one goes along.

Good as this correspondence is, it isn't up to Larkin's letters because Amis doesn't believe or feel as deeply as Larkin does, nor does he have as focussed a perspective as Larkin, so the humor isn't set set off in such sharp contradistinction to a fundamental seriousness. Yet you keep reading because the book clears away cant and intellectual fustian so vigorously. Moreover, it gives just enough glimpse of Amis's biography: a sad, messy counterpoint spreads out in the background: the meanderings of a brilliant man with a zillion reactions and nothing firm to attach them to.

Larkin's parody of his own poem "Days" on page 1040 is not to be missed; it's in one of Leader's helpful footnotes.

This book weighs a couple of pounds, so is hard to hold--to be read at table rather than in bed. Couldn't the publisher have used lighter weight paper and given us smaller type and less margin?

Volumes of letters should be judged by their editing as much as their content, hence the five stars. Z. Leader is thorough, intelligent, impartial, and exact. There is sufficient scholarly apparatus to guide the working academic and the demanding lay reader. As for the letters, well, there are a lot of them. Despite his professed laziness, Amis cranked off an immense amount of smart, thoughtful, scurrilous, and funny correspondence in the 50+ years recorded here. Exemplary funny bits are on pages 276-277 in a 1952 letter to Philip Larkin. If you laugh, buy the book. If you don't, don't. If you're shocked by cruel, rude jokes between close friends, don't. Amis demanded, and often provided, hard thinking, precise expression, and blunt honesty. His staunchly conservative, sometimes reactionary, views contrast interestingly with his drunken philandering, which should provoke thought among those readers who enjoy thinking at all.

This wonderful novel is not a detective story; not an allegory; especially not a work of theology. I haven't the audacity to attempt to define what it is. Chesterton did, however, and it's right there in the title: "A Nightmare". The story unfolds as a dream does, illogically and vividly. I approach it (and I have read it many times) as a prose poem, and a picture painted with words. Certainly it shows GKC's intensely visual imagination, and his ability to create a landscape in the mind. It is also an extended commentary on the Book of Job; in both, a mystery is answered with a greater mystery. Thus the enigmatic ending. GKC was a modern mystic, who saw creation as a pageant to be lived - and loved - rather than a propostion to be solved.

In short a brilliant book, complex, subtle, funny and thought provoking on the inner working of God. Still the main point of this review is for the fools who are calling Chesterton a racist anti-Semitic ect... Just look at the 1 star reviews and you'll see the dribble. These people are A: unaware of Chesterton's close friendship with a Jewish lady named Francis Steinthal who he and his wife dearly loved, and B: quite obviously have never read his other marvelous work "Eugenics and Other Evils." It really makes me wonder why the uneducated are allowed to plague our society with their nonsense. Anyway buy Thursday it's a wonderful and step into Chesterton's genius.

"The Man Who was Thursday" is a fantastic, bizarre puzzle that defies attempts at explanation or description. On the surface, it is a spy story about anarchistic terrorists with elements of suspense and paranoia; as you dig a little deeper, a black comedy emerges; peeling back a few more layers reveals a philosophical underbelly; and it all ends in an uproariously enigmatic denouement worthy of Lewis Carroll. If the book is, as its subtitle indicates, a nightmare, we all should hope to have dreams as sweet as this.

The hero, Gabriel Syme, is a poet-detective (yes, seriously) who works for a special branch of Scotland Yard dedicated to apprehending "intellectual" criminals, particularly anarchists, because they tend to be the most subversive and therefore the most dangerous. By operating undercover as a poet-anarchist, Syme manages to infiltrate the seven-member Central Anarchist Council, who alias themselves using the names of the days of the week, and fills the vacant slot of "Thursday." The Council's main directive is to cast the world into chaos by assassinating heads of state, and their current plan, as masterminded by their president, "Sunday," is to bomb the upcoming meeting of the Russian Czar and the French president in Paris.

It is, of course, up to Syme/Thursday, who is always at risk of being exposed as a policeman, to put a stop to this nefarious scheme, to which there is naturally more than meets the eye. As the plot unfolds, it breaks down (or builds up) into an indescribably wild farce; Syme's mission turns into a picaresque adventure of disguises, a swordfight, and several chases -- involving horses, cars, an elephant, and a hot-air balloon. At the end of the book, a surprise is waiting; a strange detachment from everything that has preceded it, which slyly lets the reader in on its symbolic joke. If not for its relentlessly silly tone and idiosyncratic resolution, "The Man Who was Thursday" could be a perfect sister novel to Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent."

Like fellow British wits Dickens, Wodehouse, and Waugh, Chesterton is that rare sort of writer who is skilled in combining breathtaking narrative with irreverent and intelligent comedy and whose prose is as poetical as it is humorous. The fact that Kingsley Amis called this novel the "most thrilling" book he'd ever read speaks volumes.

Having read Wendy Cope's poem 'He Tells Her' I was a little dissappointed in this book of her poems.
They are good but some are very similiar in nature.
I enjoy modern poetry and recommend Judith Viorst also a modern poet.

we don't get to see as much of wendy cope in the u.s. as i had hoped, so i ordered a couple of her books from amazon uk. the few poems i had come across of wendy cope's have been great poems. her touch of humor is excellent in those poems. but the poems in this collection are less than stellar. much of the time the rhymes are predictable and uninteresting. her repetition of styles and themes gets old (god knows she must love the villanelle). in this collection her nursery rhyme imitations are phenomena. i can just see wordsworth and eliot writing those. her strength seems to be in mimicry, which she didn't do much of here. i don't know, maybe the poems i like so much came from serious concerns. if you want to read someone who is a better formal poet, and has what is probably the greatest wit of any living poet, check out R.S. Gwynn's selected poems: No Word of Farewell. it's well worth it.

wendy cope's delightful collection of poetry sparkles with wit and erudition. the highlight clearly being the title poem and the nursery rhymes. the typically sardonic brit humor shines through in most of her poems and make one laugh out loud. who ever thought reading poetry could be such a delightful experience?

however, one does wish there were a few more of her touching and sensitive poems like the one on her lover and the other one about a photograph. clearly the talent is there, maybe she will dish them all out in a separate collection one day.

till then enjoy finding out about the cocoa she made for kingsley amis.

Stanley Duke's teenage son, Steve, has gone mad. Stan is a perplexed misogynist surrounded by women - ex-wife Nowell, Trish (Steve's doctor), his wife Susan and her snotty mother. Trish, as she treats Steve, thinks and speaks in a voguish but threatening psychobabble. The diatribes of Stan and his mates against this inability to call a madman a madman - indeed, all offences against common sense - and against the strangeness of 'females' provide the most enjoyment - a coherent but increasingly extreme rage. Stan finally loses all faith in women - and Steve ends the story as mad as he began. Rating 64.2%

"Stanley and the Women" is a lot darker than other Amis novels. The protagonist, Stanley Duke, is a man with a lot of problems--he drinks too much, has a rather unpleasant ex-wife, self-centered, shallow actress, Nowell, a cold and brittle second wife, Susan, and a son, Steve, who goes mad one day.

Steve has always been an "underachiever." But one night, he shows up dishevelled, disoriented and mumbling something about alien invasions. While Steve descends into madness, Stanley battles with the psychiatric branch of the National Health Service. Ping-ponging between diagnoses, hospital politics, prevailing therapy theories, and psychiatrists (who--in terms of mental competency--are indistinguishable from the patients), Stanley tries to maintain the domestic status quo.

Reading this book reminded me, once again, why I love literature. This was not an upbeat or humourous read ("Lucky Jim"), but, nonetheless, I found Stanley's memories of losing a childhood acquaintance profoundly moving. How this early experience then shaped Stanley's attitudes towards the medical profession was intricately woven into the tale. The idea that one incident from childhood can set a pattern, or attitude for life gave me food for thought, and also caused me to remember a similiar incident from my own childhood that I had not thought about for many years.

Kingsley Amis is best known as a satirist -- Lucky Jim is one of the funniest books since World War II -- but he always had an interest in science fiction (according to his son Martin, one of his favorite movies was The Terminator), and this book presents an alternative history in which Britain remained a Catholic country, and Martin Luther was reconciled to the Church. Other changes including Bethoven writing 20 symphonies and Mozart dying even earlier than in real life. The main character is a boy (Hubert) about to lose his voice because of puberty; the "alteration" of the title is castration to preserve that voice. Amis presents a well-thought out altenrate version, and the adventures of Hubert to escape his alteration are both interesting and used to further explain this alternative history. Unfortunately, the book is out of print in the U.S.; I got my copy on a trip to Britain. Almost anything Kingsley Amis wrote is interesting, and it is our loss that more of his works are not available in the U.S.

Let me preface this by saying that I love Kingsley's novels and admire Martin's--especially "The Information". So naturally I was delighted to hear that Martin had written a memoir that featured stories about Kingsley and Philip Larkin and other notables. Well, there aren't nearly enough stories about Martin's famous friends, and the anecdotes he tells often are strangely lifeless. For instance, he recounts several long conversations he's had with Saul Bellow and they're BORING and pointless. Surely Bellow isn't this dull? (And is it necessary for Martin to include several long quotes from "Ravelstein" and a plot summary? Please! I've already read "Ravlestein"!)Also Martin is friends with Salman Rushdie. Surely he has an interesting anecdote or two about Rushdie? Alas, no. The book contains a few good stories from Martin's childhood and college years, but by and large the book's liveliest pages concern Kingsley. The only good jokes are the ones Martin remembers Kingsley telling him, and the best quotes in the book are, not surprisingly, passages from Kingsley's novels or poems or Kingsley's parodies of other people's poems. Martin seems to realize that he's short of great material, as several times he retells a joke that appeared 100 pages earlier. (Is their an editor in the house? Why didn't the [alleged] editors chop off at least 200 pages from this thing?) So if you really, really, love Kingsley, get a copy of this book and speedread through the boring parts. If you're not wild about Kingsley, there's absolutely nothing in this book that would interest you.

As much as I enjoyed this book, and as much as I truly admire Martin Amis, there was something a bit contrived in the construction of "Experience" that ultimately undermined it for me. I saw Amis speak recently and he admitted having to fight novelistic urges when writing this "memoir" and frankly I don't think he was able to restrain himself. Throughout the book Amis returns to the disappearance of his cousin Lucy in 1973, who turns out was murdered by a serial killer (as would come to light years later). Now it is worth knowing that Lucy's family has protested that Amis barely knew Lucy and I can't help feeling he is plumping up her role in his life for thematic reasons. The title of the book is after all is "Experience" and much of the book is about the shedding of innocence and his cousin Lucy is of course a perfect symbol for this. And his writing on Lucy borders on the treacly, something I never thought possible from Martin Amis.

Nevertheless putting aside the rather heavy handed shaping of this book and the discomfort I can't escape feeling about his near exploitive use of his cousin, this is still a fine book. When he steps out of the corset of his theme of lost innocence Amis's wry humor is still intact, particularly in his affectionate yet hardly uncritical portrait of his father.

And while many have complained that Martin spent far too much time talking about his teeth, I can guarantee you if you finish the book you will be flossing and brushing regularly for the forseeable future.

I used to have Martin Amis down as both a brilliant writer and an honest one. Now I think of him only as brilliant. 'Experience' is superbly written, but it is, ultimately, evasive. Dirt is not required, not by any means, but what is very clear from Amis's life, and let us believe only a fraction of what the newspapers report, is that there have been times when he has caught himself in very painful (and therefore interesting) situations. The problem with 'Experience' is that Amis expends so much candid energy (and his stamina for high style remains astonishing) discussing the effect that other peoples pain has had on him. His old man, his cousin, various deceased dogs. Amis deals with the anger and grief inflicted upon himself by others suffering beautifully. In short, the pifalls of those he loves are Martin Amis's grief. This however, is all noble pain, it's things we can't help, life, luck. We have no real obligation to feel grief over the death of a father, or a murdered cousin (we may hate them) but it serves to remind us of our own humanity when we do. Amis spends nearly the whole of Experience plugging a simple underlying theme, no more complicated or unpretentious then this; 'I am a humane man.' This is a believable theme and evidence abounds for it in all his novels. But his novels also abound with a certain beady-eyed blackness, an eye for the exquistely pathetic and the hilarity and range of human weakness. To write 'Experience' Amis dropped his most wicked tools, and if your going to write something about YOURSELF, and you want it to be honest and complete, as well as effective and excellent (which 'Experience' unquestionably is), you cannot do this.

I need some examples. Heres two. Amis's sister Sally, seems to have literally expired out of existence. She was 46 and died of an 'infection' after a long depression related illness. Unlike Lucy Partington, Amis's cousin, Sally barely merits a mention after childhood in "Experience." (Amis's brother is also a peculiarly hollow figure.) Granted, Lucy Partington was murdered by Fred West, simaeltaneously unique, sensational, horrific, fully worthy of extensive comment. But Sally Amis, is also dead, also a little tragic, also worty of extensive comment, and she is Martin Amis's sister.

Martin Amis parted from his wife and children to start a new life with another woman. All we get from 'Experience' about these events is that they made him cry on a plane. Discretion is understandable, this fact is NOT missed. But Martin Amis left his wife and children for another woman, a happening that in other writings he has suggested is THE life event, and all he tells the reader about it is that he cried on a plane. Even if this is an indicator of a larger remorse and grief, it is NOT enough. Tragic as it is, writing about a murdered cousin is NOT the hard stuff, writing about self-inflicted family fracture IS.

Actually maybe dishonesty is a misguided accusation, maybe there is a second underlying theme that runs through 'Experience' along these lines. ' No I am not going to go to close to home because it is A. too painful and B.(perhaps a sub-theme of A) just TOO private.

No autobiography (except perhaps those ghost written on behalf of single-celled lock forwards) tells the WHOLE story. But, by my reckoning, Martin Amis's 'Experience' won't shed a light on so much as half. It is an effective and excellent BOOK, it is also a wholly incomplete AUTOBIOGRAPHY. All the superlatives (brilliant, excellent, superb) are well deserved, but they are wierdly offset by what some people may call 'Englishness' and there is something of a the stiff upper lip about the finished product. But if there's one thing that the body of Amis's work, considered as a whole will tell you, its that Amis knows BETTER then that, and that at the heart of the books agile evasiveness, lies, not just a want of privacy but a lack of real courage.