Mind Your Bad English, Kingsley Amis ‘Don’t Like It’
24th October 2011
Kingsley Amis died in 1995, and this book was found among his effects (I can imagine him making good comic play with that usage), and published. Now it has been reissued, with a new introduction by Kingsley’s son, Martin, for the century its author never saw. The title refers to the famous book of the same name by the Fowler brothers, whom Amis greatly admired, but also to Amis himself: “The King” was a nickname which, as Martin puts it, his father “tolerated”. I remember Kingsley fantasising that he employed a gang of East End vigilantes who would go round to the door of pretentious writers and confront them with their literary crimes: “Don’t do it,” they would say menacingly, “The King don’t like it.”