Sunday 16:00-16:30, repeated Thursday 16:00-16:30, except first Sunday in the month when it is replaced by Book Club.
Open Book spotlights new fiction and non-fiction, picks out the best of the paperbacks, talks to authors and publishers, and unearths lost masterpieces.
This week
Sunday 19 November 2006
To coincide with the publication of a new biography of Kingsley Amis, Open Book re-appraises the writing of Lucky Jim's creator his son, Martin, himself a brilliant novelist and essayist.
Kingsley Amis was called many things during his lifetime - the best comic novelist since P. G. Wodehouse, a misogynist, a loyal friend but an often absent father.
These judgements sometimes serve to obscure rather than illuminate the man and the nature of his achievement both of which will be coming under renewed scrutiny this month with the publication of an authorised biography.
To coincide with this particular event Open Book decided to re-appraise the writing of Lucky Jim's creator with Kingsley's son, Martin, himself a brilliant novelist and essayist.
In a moving and funny interview with Mariella Frostrup, Martin describes how he first realised what his father did for a living, how they responded to each other's work and how he has come to recognise how much they shared a common sense of humour.
He talks too of the way in which he was comforted by his father when his first marriage ended and suggests that Kingsley owed his reputation as a curmudgeon more to his love of pricking the bubble of received opinion than to any true fondness for the reactionary.
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0141182598
