Why Lucky Jim Turned Roght-Obituary of Kingsley Amis

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n 1939), Amis won a place at St John's College, Oxford, in 1941. His university education was interrupted by service in the army between 1942 and 1945. The army made quite an impact on him, as it did on many others in that period. His Memoirs bring out the bewildering absurdity of it as an institution:

The British Army has been compared to many other institutions - school, lunatic asylum, prison and so on - but one parallel which has never been drawn before, I think, is with a society of the kind you read about in some science-fiction stories, a world much like our own in general appearance but with some of the rules changed or removed, a logic only partly coinciding with that of our own world, and some unpredictable areas where logic seems missing altogether or to point opposite ways at once.4 To get some sense of what the army meant to him politically one needs to look at the few short stories he devoted to the topic.5 They provide graphic illustrations of the arbitrary power senior officers exercised and the pressure to conform at the ex...