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 ...

Something Nasty in the Bookshop Between the Gardening and the Cookery Comes the brief Poetry shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology Offers itself. Critical, and with nothing else to do, I scan ...

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, ...

This illuminating biography by a professor of English at the University of Ulster plumbs the interrelationship of life and art—an idea Bradford's subject, the late Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), would ...

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 ...

Humour has been an integral part of literature and has played an important role in reflecting and commenting on society. It ...

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 ...

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 ...

Kingsley Amis was a prominent British novelist, poet, critic, and satirist best known for his debut novel, Lucky Jim, a seminal work of postwar comic fiction that helped define the so-called "Angry ...