PART ONE 1946-1969: EXPOSING FLAWS IN ANTIMODELS AND FORMATIVE INFLUENCES. Exploring Critical Misinterpretations and the Roots of Antimodels -- Lessons of The Legacy, a Comparison with Wain, and the Development of a Narrative Voice in Lucky Jim -- Defining the Self: Writing Against Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin in That Uncertain Feeling -- Lessons in Storytelling: Graham Greene, Modernism, and I Like It Here -- Experiments in Content: William Empson, Ambiguity, and Take a Girl Like You -- Evelyn Waugh, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and Englishness in One Fat Englishman -- Limitations of the Provincial Aesthetic in Amis's Poetry: Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country -- New Reasons to Write: Entertainment and the Inner Audience in The Egyptologists, The Anti-Death League, and I Want It Now
PART TWO BALANCE Contents 1969-1995: TOWARDS RECIPROCITY AND BALANCE. Looking into the Artistic Future: The Green Man, Girl, 20, Ending Up, and The Alteration -- Problems with Language and Balance: Jake's Thing, Stanley and the Women, and Russian Hide-and-Seek -- Resolving Creative Problems: The Old Devils, Difficulties with Girls, The Folks That Live on the Hill, and The Russian Girl -- Final Creative Self-Definitions: You Can't Do Both and The Biographer's Moustache -- Conclusions
