Quotes from One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis
Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger. The first time the two men met, an incident with a briefcase lock had suggested to him that here was a formidable rival in the last-named field The notion of the universe as the handiwork of the Almighty received a severe check at Pargeter. It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children. Irving Macher runs off with Helen Americans pursue the dollar; the British had an empire. Fascinating to see the underlying assumptions and goals of a culture laid bare in its idiom. Fascinating, but not surprising. Language is before anything else the great social instrument The character’s promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking certainly had autobiographical sources. For the novel’s American setting, Amis was drawing on his experience as a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in 1958–9, when, he informed his frie...
