After an afternoon of enforced madrigals, Jim becomes so horribly drunk that he inadvertently destroys his host's spare room. One of the more brilliant concerns a weekend at the home of a ghastly senior professor. Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language. Despite this non-specific lust, he does have a girlfriend of sorts: the grotesque Margaret, whose "tinkle of tiny silver bells" laugh will freeze the heart of any would-be coquette. Having clawed his way into a second-rate university he manages to cram the occasional desultory lecture around the more urgent business of persuading pretty girls to take his classes. The titular Jim Dixon is an academic of a pretty poor sort, a medievalist who only picked the period because it looked like a soft option. H as there even been a writer so choked with bile as Kingsley Amis? None of his novels look particularly kindly upon his fellow man, but Lucky Jim, his first, is driven by a particularly epic disdain for the idiocies, pedantries, mindless rules and unpleasant personal habits with which humanity is cursed.
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