The ‘King’ of the title is of course Kingsley Amis, under a nickname which he ‘tolerated’ according to his son Martin Amis in the introduction. This book, published posthumously, is Kingsley’s take on good use of the English language, a sort of updated and more personal version of the Fowler brothers’ 1906 book of the same name. The entries are on the whole shorter than those of the Fowlers’ and at first glance the book may look like a reference work, to be consulted rather than read through. Yet the Amis’s writing style, and sometimes idiosyncratic titling of entries, means that it is far more usefully and enjoyably read cover to cover.

In many of the entries aspects of Amis’s personality and habits show through, giving the whole book a conversational tone lacking from most style guides. We learn, for example, that he drinks Glenmorangie whiskey (stressing the third syllable of the name) and that he has a low regard for EM Forster, while his close friend Philip Larkin is mentioned more than any writer other than Henry Fowler.

This informal tone is strengthened by the way we are made complicit in the author’s opinions by the use of ‘we’ to refer to the readers, as in “Not the sort of thing we hope to find in our sort of book”. This also serves to make it an extremely amusing style-guide, as one is allowed the privilege of laughing at the errors Amis quotes, while of course suppressing the nagging feeling that one has done much worse oneself.

Amis’s advice is straightforward and practical, never entering the realms of pedantry yet sufficiently learned and sincere to make him a guide worth heeding. When he points out errors or inelegancies creeping into the language one is certain that he does so not from a pointless nostalgia but because something is being lost or damaged: “The objection to slipshod language is not so much its remissness, though there is that, as its effective elimination of useful expressions.”

As readers would expect and hope for from a style-guide written by a novelist of Amis’s calibre, the advice is far from limited to simple regulations, and includes plenty of suggestions aimed at improving the quality of writing beyond the simple banishing of errors. As Amis says at one point: “If a sentence keeps all the rules and still seems wrong, change it.” One piece of guidance to which he often returns to is the importance of reading any written composition out loud in order to ensure that it is as clear and readable as possible. In fact the longest section in the book is on pronunciation in its various forms.

The King’s English is now more than a decade old and all too often in reading it we can see that Amis’s prescriptions have been ignored. There is no chance now, for example, of preventing ‘author’ and ‘critique’ being used as verbs. However, almost all of the entries are still relevant and many of Amis’s bugbears still widespread but avoidable. This is far from the most comprehensive style guide out there, but it is certainly the most readable.

Bookmark to