Say “Kingsley Amis” (1922-95) and most American readers will probably give you a blank look. Twenty-five years ago, the man himself called The Washington Post’s Book World, where I was then an editor, ...

IN HIS NEW MEMOIR, "EXPERIENCE," Martin Amis recounts with wit, warmth and uncharacteristic openness his personal history as Kingsley Amis's son and literary London's enfant terrible. Since he ...

Modesty scarcely was Kingsley Amis's long suit, so perhaps it is appropriate that neither is modesty the long suit of Zachary Leader, a British academic who has written, in his gargantuan Life of ...

An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past. By the early 1950s, higher education and its rich comic possibilities had barely been ...

Quite a few lovers of English literature raised a glass—specifically a Macallan single malt Scotch with a dash of water—this past April. The occasion? The centennial of the birth of the greatest comic ...

Here is a fun literary experiment: substitute the words ill or illness in Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” (1930) with the words hung-over and hangover. It works, right? “Hangover is the great ...

In Experience , the memoir he published last year, Martin Amis confessed to a sad truth: “A writer’s life is all anxiety and ambition.” The memoir was more concerned with other matters-his father, the ...