Amis, Kingsley | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

(1922–1995), probably the greatest English comic novelist of the late twentieth century, was also a poet, a restaurant critic, and a passionate proselytizer for drink. Among Amis’s prodigious output—twenty-five published novels, seven books of poetry, and eleven nonfiction books, not to mention many thousands of letters and articles—were several books on liquid refreshment: On Drink (1972), How’s Your Glass (1984), and Everyday Drinking (1983). One handy posthumous volume,

As Amis’s friend Christopher Hitchens, himself no slouch when it came to liquid consumption, remarked in his introduction to the compilation, “Booze was his muse.” The hangover scene in Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), remains one of the most outstanding depictions of this unfortunate condition ever written. Amis’s personal tastes in cocktails were both radically simplistic and defiantly ritualistic—no road trip was complete without a cocktail hamper from which drinks had to be served at a precise hour. While most would differ with his preference for stirring all drinks with ice in a large jug and object as vigorously to the idea of tomato ketchup in a Bloody Mary as to a premade Martini, Amis’s columns in Penthouse and the Telegraph did much to demystify both cocktails and spirits in beery 1970s Britain.

Amis’s heavy, ultimately addictive drinking contributed not only to his marriage breakup and death but also to his daughter Sally’s alcoholism and early death. It casts his recommendation of a Milk Punch for breakfast in a rather darker light. See Milk Punch.