The old devils
by Kingsley Amis · first published 1986
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2018–2024first – last mentioned
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"When Alun Weaver and his wife, Rhiannon, a famous beauty in her day, move into a quiet retirement community, they find it peopled by friends from former days."--Audio cassette container.
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…story? Booker winners, in my experience have been often pretentious garbage masquerading as high art. Examples: Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) While the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is American only, the list of winners is far more justifiable as prize-worthy.
on “Why We Need Difficult Books” ↗There is a line in Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils running something like "More and more, Alun's life was coming to consist of being told what he knew, at dictation speed." A book on maps that I got in elementary school laid this all out clearly. Every…
on “The True Size Of Countries: Mercator projection” ↗Thanks. I saw a reference to it in Kingsley Amis's novel The Old Devils, but was too idle to look it up.
on “Offa’s Dyke: Britain’s unmarked ‘no-man’s land’” ↗Bookstores: back in the 1980s, Reagan National (then just National) had an excellent bookstore. I know I picked up Vasily Askyonov's The Burn there, and I think I picked up Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils there. And I believe that Milwaukee actually had a used bookstore on one concourse.
on “What’s the matter with airports? (2011)” ↗Also, it has been a very long time since I read Lucky Jim, but I don't remember it mentioning Wales or the Welsh. Amis's The Old Devils is set in Wales, and makes a certain amount of sport of both.
on “Novelists as Schoolmasters” ↗