Sabine Durrant in The Telegraph:
…“Kingsley felt women were for f— and cooking. He stopped wanting to f— because if you get really very drunk all the time you stop being able to do it. That was no good. And he hated food. He would say, ‘This isn’t very nice,’ or, worse, ‘This is a bit authentic.’” She laughs, then coughs, giving her chest a bash. “Put that in. It’s funny. He could be terribly funny. That was one of the lovely things about him, really.” Amis wouldn’t see her after she left him – in his Memoirs he refers to her mostly as “my second wife”. Did that upset her? “He never forgave me, I’m afraid. I didn’t realise the depths of his phobias until I read Mart’s [Martin Amis’s] autobiography Experience, his terror of being alone. He concealed it really, and that was a great mistake. If I had known, I think I would have been better at dealing with it.” She is still in touch with Mart, her stepson. “He always says I got him educated and it is absolutely true. I gave him a copy of Pride and Prejudice and made him read it. But I tried just as hard with Sally and Philip, his siblings, and got nowhere, so it might have happened anyway.
Picture: Elizabeth Jane Howard with Kingsley Amis at their wedding reception in 1965.
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