Sir Kingsley Amis, who died in October 1995, was born in London in 1922. In 1954 his first novel, 'Lucky Jim', burst onto the literary scene with extraordinary force, gaining him instant fame and notoriety as one of the most prominent of the so-called 'angry young men'. He went on to write over twenty novels (winning the Booker Prize in 1986 for 'The Old Devils'), and many volumes of poetry and non-fiction. He was knighted in 1991. His last novel, 'The Biographer's Moustache', was published in September 1995.