I Like It Here

Amis called it merely 'experience with style sauce' - and the novel uses material from his own life, his trip to Portugal to fulfill the conditions of his Somerset Maugham Award - he would not write such an explicitly autobiographical novel again until later works such as You Can't Do Both (1994), The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990) and, partially, The Biographer's Moustache (1995).

Perhaps it was worth dying in your forties if two hundred years later you were the only non-contemporary novelist who could be read with unaffected and whole-hearted interest, the only one who never had to be apologized for or excused on grounds of changing taste.

And how enviable to live in the world of his novels, where duty was plain, evil arose out of malevolence and a starving wayfarer could be invited indoors without fear.

('Billy') Barley, an 'English business type' - he worked as a translator in the offices of a Portuguese family named Pinto Basto, friends of John Aeron-Thomas.

[3] Amis called him, in a letter to Philip Larkin (10 July 1955) - 'very amiable in a childish way, which is a heap better than some mature ways' - 'he doesn't quite know which country he belongs to - he is a motor-bike maniac, endlessly discussing the engine of his German motor-scooter ("This is one of the only twelve that were ever put on the market in Portugal").'