Experience (Martin Amis) very moved. What seems at first just gossip and guestlists - sprays of names offered without explanation, diaristic footnotes, a refusal to universalise - soon becomes a kind of tender defiance, as if Amis wanted the book to vibrate with an atmosphere of wounded privacy." Terence Baker, in "The Sunday Times", called it a "careful, heartfelt tribute." Jackie Wullschlager, wrote in the "Financial Times", "The core here is family, and it is movingly, beautifully, evoked... The raw materials – neurotic, outrageous genius of a father; gorgeous earth-mother Hilly; sophisticated step-mother Elizabeth Jane Howard; stunning girlfriends dropped along the way like
Kingsley Amis literary style and tone changed significantly after 1970, with the possible exception of "The Old Devils", a Booker Prize winner. Several critics accused him of being old fashioned and misogynistic. His "Stanley and the Women", an exploration of social sanity, could be said to instance these traits. Others said that his output lacked the humanity, wit and compassion of earlier efforts. This period also saw Amis the anthologist, a role in which his wide knowledge of all kinds of English poetry was on display. "The New Oxford Book of Light Verse" (1978), which he edited, was a revision of the