Kingsley martin autobiography examples
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Kingsley Amis: Biography
Here is a look at the most important events in the life of Kingsley Amis.
Early life and education
Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in London and raised in Norbury, a small community south of London. The writer recalls feeling a great deal of boredom in his dull middle-class upbringing and found escape in literature at an early age. Amis excelled at school and published his first short story in the school magazine at 11.
Following his father's footsteps, Amis attended the City of London School for a year before winning a scholarship to study English at Oxford University in 1941. Historically, the student body of Oxford was exclusively made up of children from Britain's wealthiest and most powerful families. Amis' lower middle-class background made him stand out, and the writer developed a deep suspicion of the upper classes. This sense of class tension would become a recurring theme in many of his works.
Fig. 1 - At Oxford, Amis found himsel
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Spartacus Educational
Primary Sources
(1) In his book, Father Figures, Kingsley Martin explained the influence that his father had on his political and religious opinions.
I was proud of holding my father's opinions. I was a pacifist and socialist among conservatives without knowing what these labels meant. This was bad for me. All boys in adolescence must break with their parents. My trouble was that my father gave me no chance at all to quarrel with him. If he had been a dogmatic Christian, I should have reached my later humanism long before I did. If he had been an atheist I might have relapsed into some form of Christian faith. But he was ready to discuss everything and to yield when he was wrong. I could not quarrel. On the contrary, I fought side by side with him, and was a dissenter, not against his dissent, but with him against the Establishment. His causes became my causes, his revolt was mine.
(2) Kingsley Martin, Father Figures (1966)
My father was involve
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Kingsley Martin. Image: National Portrait Gallery, London
In May 1943, I went to see Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, at his house nära Dunmow in Essex. inom was 21 and had just been discharged from the RAF on health grounds; Harold Laski, my former professor at the London School of Economics, had recommended me to Kingsley as a personal writer. It was a job interview but inom remember we spent much of the afternoon speculating about the war and playing chess. It was only when he took me to the hållplats afterwards that he sprang his catch question. Picking up the Evening Standard, which inom had not seen, he asked, “What would you do now if you were Stalin?” I blurted out, “I would abolish the Comintern.” He laughed and said, “How did you know? You must have seen the paper already!”
As we waited for the lära, he told me how he had been appointed editor of the NS in 1930. He had been interviewed over måltid at the Savoy bygd the company chairman, the novelist Arnold Bennett