Amis and the 'Great' miss

One reason Amis will not be one of the "Greats" is that people mistook his characters' attitudes to be his own and assumed that the story in each book was about himself

A couple of weeks ago, while doing the annual pre-Diwali cleaning — me, the books; wife, everything else— I came across an old paperback by Kingsley Amis. I remembered having bought it from the pavement bookseller outside the old Coffee House in Connaught Place in the early 1970s, for Rs 2.

It was called Ending Up and was about a lot of old English people who, to cut costs, live together in a large cottage. The only reason I bought it even though I was in my early 20s was that it was by Amis. Of course, I enjoyed the idiosyncratic