The Oldie

All hail the King

It’s a good job that, a century after he was born, the works of Sir Kingsley Amis CBE aren’t generally in print, as they’d be hastily cancelled, with students and lecturers running a mile.

The attitudes on parade in his novels are very much, shall we say, of their time – the fifties through to the seventies – and harden in the end into a sort of caricatured Garrick Club gruffness, or a Colonel Blimpishness.

Those attitudes are nevertheless startling, even to his admirers, and were always misogynistic, chauvinistic. Take a Girl Like You, for example, published in 1960, is basically about rape, and how an arrogant male (Patrick Standish) is ‘justified’ in behaving as he behaves if the female in question, Jenny Bunn, is beautiful and provocative – as if, underneath, despite protests, she’s asking for it.

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