The Green Man

Product Information

John Wakeman, World Authors 1950–1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth Century Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, pp. 448–448 ISBN 0824204190.

The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous, “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author ( The New York Times ) The series won the 1991 BAFTA for Best Original Television Music (by Tim Souster), Finney was nominated for Best Actor, and Masahiro Hirakubo was nominated for Best Film Editor.

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I'm a big fan of that style of particular British writing where the authors are hellbent on proper grammar and word usage. It's like a completely different language than the one I muddle about in. Martin Amis wrote in his memoir about heading up to his old man's house every Sunday and have the old bastard reading Martin's newspaper articles and telling how how he used the inferior, vulgar and utterly punishable newspaper meaning of a word, which has slowly taken over to become the word's only meaning (for further elaboration on this, try Martin's Experience: A Memoir or Kingsley's The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage, where he sits with a dictionary and a drink and tells you in all sorts of ways how your writing wouldn't get you far as a 50's man of letters). Kingsley Amis in the Great Tradition and in Our Time," by Robert H. Bell, Williams College. Introduction to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, ed. Robert H. Bell, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. Amis, Kingsley (2000). Leader, Zachary (ed.). The Letters of Kingsley Amis. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-257095-5. How strange. I wrote a book like that you know. It was called The Green Man. A semi-alcoholic, over-educated, underachieving womaniser owns a pub haunted by the spirit of a 17th century scholar called Dr Underhill who summons dark folk-lore spirits and uses them to his own paedophilic ends. What makes The Green Man readable and re-readable is the skill with which Amis, like Henry James before him, turns the narrative screw. It is, quite simply, a rattling good ghost story.

The Green Man is a three-part BBC TV adaptation of Kingsley Amis's 1969 novel of the same name, first broadcast on BBC1 from 28 October to 11 November 1990 and starring Albert Finney as the main character Maurice. But its inspiration, a literary myth, DID help. Enormously. And this ancient story about another green man proved to illustrate the trajectory of my later life, when I had finally learned to bend in compassion. This is almost the perfect pub book. It is set in a pub, its protagonist is the publican, it is an effective and exciting thriller, a ghost story, a social satire full of wit, a sombre reflection on the fragility of love and life, and the only novel I know in which God makes a personal appearance.How rarely do we come across the really frightening ghost story now. Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man was a rare and honourable exception, and Amis followed the classic pattern of earlier writers, letting the story progress carefully from a recognisable normality, through unease, to the rapid unfolding of horror that marks out the most successful and scarifying of all horror story writers.” I think this book is a perfect ghost story, with everything that is supposed to be there, there, per tradition. Amis, Martin (2002). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Talk Miramax Books. ISBN 978-1400032204. Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk – "quite an important one, fluent in Spanish and responsible for exporting mustard to South America" – for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London, [3] and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas). [4] [5] The Amis grandparents were wealthy. William Amis's father, the glass merchant Joseph James Amis, owned a mansion called Barchester at Purley, then part of Surrey. Amis considered J. J. Amis – always called "Pater" or "Dadda" – "a jokey, excitable, silly little man", whom he "disliked and was repelled by". [6]

In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Amis (like his father before him) won a scholarship to the City of London School. [10] In April 1941, after his first year, he was admitted on a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he read English. There he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. [11] Norwich, John Julius (1990). Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Arts. USA: Oxford University Press. p.15. ISBN 978-0198691372. Amis was raised at Norbury – in his later estimation "not really a place, it's an expression on a map ... really I should say I came from Norbury station." [8] Having been educated first at St Hilda's, an "undistinguished, long-vanished local school ... an independent girls' school of the kind which also took small boys, before they became pubescent and dangerous", he then moved to nearby Norbury College. [9] Maurice Allington is a fifty something, twice married, inn keeper/hotelier. For Maurice, life is a high speed, roller-coaster ride of juggling his various commitments - in this case 'commitment' equates to womanizing, drinking heavily, running his period inn The Green Man, and embellishing his establishment with tales of the resident ghost. On top of this he needs to find time to appease the boredom of his teenage daughter... oh, yes, and did I mention more whisky and women.Since you are here, we would like to share our vision for the future of travel - and the direction Culture Trip is moving in.