"The empty room gazed bleakly at Bond. As always, everything was meticulously in its place, the lines of naval prints exactly horizontal on the walls, water-colour materials laid out as if for inspection on the painting-table up against the window. It all had a weirdly artifical, detached air, like part of a museum where the furniture and effects of some historical figure are preserved just as they were in his lifetime." (from Colonel Sun)
Amis's anti-intellectual stance is also reflected in such anthologies as THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE (1978) and THE POPULAR RECITER (1978). Among his other works are books on drink, columns on food for Harper's and Queen, detective books, critical study RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975), MEMOIRS (1990), and THE KING'S ENGLISH (1998), mini-essays on the craft of writing well. --'I don't really like reading anything. I don't think reading is an experience.'
--'But what about people reading you? Isn't that an experience?' Jenny felt horrible as she used the word. --'I don't really care about reading me, I'm a writer,' said Vera Selig...'
(from Difficulties with Girls, 1988)
In the 1980s Amis wrote the Booker Prize winning novel THE OLD DEVILS (1986), which tells the story of a group of retired friends and their wives, whose lives revolve around social drinking, and the effect on them of the reappearance of Alun Weaver, a professionally Welsh literary pundit. Semi-autobiographical YOU CAN'T DO BOTH (1994) was set between the wars, and told the story of Robin Davies, who progresses from south London suburbia, through Oxford, and on to a lectureship in a provincial university. Amis had three children from his first marriage to Hilary Bardwell. He was married from 1965 to 1983 to the novelist Elisabeth Jane Howard. Amis was knighted in 1990. He died in 1995 at the age of 73 with over 20 novels to his credit, plus dozens of volumes of poetry, stories, collections of essays, and criticism. The popular notion of Amis as mean spirited reactionary has been criticized by Paul Fussell in his monograph The Anti-Egotist. Fussell sees the author as one of the great literary moralists of this century. A "cultural democrat," Amis values honesty, civility, and lack of pretense. The only novelist Amis admitted reading (other than his son Martin), was George McDonald Frazer, author of the Flashman series.