(1) About two hundred pages into Kingsley Amis’s well-known and still wonderful comic novel Lucky Jim there is a paragraph that seems to rise above the rest, to take the novel’s vision of human behavior to another level, beyond particulars to revelation. Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, British musical comedians of Kingsley Amis’s generation, had a nice line about how “the purpose of satire . . . is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth, and […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: agency, ethics, fiction, Flanders and Swann, Kingsley Amis, Merleau-Ponty, satire, Sixties