These days, owning up to an admiration for Kingsley Amis is a bit like saying you're rather keen on blood sports or that nice Michael Howard. Amis senior seems to be English literature's living embodiment of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, a curmudgeon who rails against the Arts Council, trendy lefties, one-armed bandits, poetry that doesn't rhyme, uppity women and all manner of symptoms of the decline and fall of a Britain that used to be great.

Still, though, but … taking a deep breath and covering my head with my hands, I am going to blurt out that Kingsley Amis is a great writer. Yes, I know he is a misogynist and reactionary and can make John Osborne look like a big softie. However, between winces and flinches, I'd like to point out that you don't have to agree with a writer to admire his writing. And that the book I'd like to recommend here is one that was written in his (mildly) left-wing days, a book in fact that once gave him the (mistaken) reputation for being something of a working-class hero.

Amis was 31 when Lucky Jim appeared in 1954. It was his first published novel, and, despite the fact that he has produced nigh-on 40 books since in a hugely distinguished and always controversial career, it remains his best-known work. In the 1950s it became a cause célèbre, attracting the spluttering wrath of writers like Somerset Maugham and inspiring pundits to label Amis an Angry Young Man, a radical and a rebel.

Reading the novel now, it is difficult to see what all that fuss was about. Lucky Jim is primarily a brilliant comic novel, a book whose aim is clearly not to inspire readers to man any barricades, but to force them to slap their thighs and shout with laughter. The narrative is superbly constructed. Not a scene or character trait is wasted. The dénouement, featuring the most tortuously slow bus journey in fiction (“Was the driver slumped in his seat, the victim of syncope, or had he suddenly got an idea for a poem?”), is a masterpiece of tension and farce.

So just why did this apparently innocuous, hilarious comedy create such a stir? Why was Jim Dixon vilified as “scum” by Maugham? Why did the novel give Amis the reputation of being an oik, and boor, a “Welfare Wodehouse”, a “fish-and-chip Waugh”?

The answer is that Lucky Jim was a radical book for its time. That radicalism has little to do with its form since the novel is an eminently traditional social comedy. However, it did represent a real literary departure in providing a hero who was not only normal and ordinary but had no patience for anything that smacked of the pretentiously cultured or sophisticated. That Jim famously scorned “filthy Mozart” and ate fried eggs with his fingers was just too much for many readers to take in the early Fifties, for this was a time when literary heroes were expected to suffer from refined despair or at the very least dine in clubs.

Amis knew what he was doing, of course. He knew what the literary Establishment wanted from their bright young writers and he knew just how to provoke them by supplying exactly the opposite. “I just enjoy annoying people,” he once said, and Lucky Jim certainly annoyed the upper-class literati of the time by mocking all they held dear and asserting that the ordinary—i.e., non-upper-class culture—they despised was worth enjoying and celebrating. It seems an obvious point to make now but the scandal that Lucky Jim caused proved that it was a daring point to make then.

And the legacy of cultural scorn and snobbery continues. Particularly in travel writing, for travel writers spurn “the masses” in their search for the exotic. It was in reaction to the precious, smug self-advertisement that often masquerades as travel writing that I decided to write Here We Go, a travel book about a place actually visited by millions of people (and therefore, of course, neglected by travel writers)—the Costa del Sol. The book is intended to celebrate the whole business of holidaymaking, for as Jim Dixon acutely observes, “nice things are nicer than nasty ones”. Not that the research didn't provide some nasty mementoes—I still shudder at the memory of one particular drug-crazed hangover in Torremolinos. However, that Spanish holiday of beers, discos and beaches, of long summer days and hazy karaoke nights is one that I cherish. I'm sure Jim Dixon would have enjoyed it too.