Lee, Laurie - Kingsley Amis (review date 17 June 1955)

Kingsley Amis (review date 17 June 1955)

SOURCE: "Is the Travel-Book Dead?" in The Spectator, Vol. 194, No. 6625, June 17, 1955, pp. 774-75.

[Amis was an English educator, short story writer, critic, and essayist. In the following negative review, he characterizes A Rose for Winter as "vulgar and sensational."]

The vogue for the highbrow travel-book shows no immediate signs of abating…. The usual characteristics of such books are, first, a leaning towards the more elaborate and unfashionable graces of prose—rightly unfashionable they seem to me, if I may show my hand thus early—and, secondly, a desire to get away from the exhausted sterilities of Western civilisation so feelingly alluded to from time to time by Mr. Priestley. In themselves, these two things may be all very well, though I judge it unlikely; in practice, however, the stylistic graces degenerate briskly into an empty and indecent poeticism, apparently based on a...

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