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Recently, I read a lovely book about the pleasures of alcohol: Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis. It is a distillation (gettit!) of articles originally written for a monthly publication. It’s a beautifully written book, silky and deceptively simple.

Kingers covers the history of alcohol, recipes, the boozing man’s diet, tips for the stingy and a highly recommended guide to The Hangover. He is definitely your man for the cocktail.

Here is a master writer at his journalistic best. Amis is opinionated, generous and joyous. And his writing is sublime. Read this book, contributors, and weep. This is a writer totally in command: supple, erudite and graceful. Amis is the sort of writer that doesn’t have to think about how he’s going to say something, just what he wants to say.

On the downside, the book is padded out somewhat with quizzes and the occasional repetition, but if you like guilt-free, life-enhancing drinking and some great writing, then read this book with the tipple of your choice.

And now we come to one of the reasons that Kingsley Amis writes so well. He knows and loves the English Language. He understands the grammar and has perfect pitch for usage. The King’s English - A Guide to Modern Usage is Amis’s update on Fowler’s Modern English Usage. He takes us from A to Z (actually, Y) dealing with spelling, grammar, meaning, derivation and usage. Particularly useful are the words to avoid.

A book to dip into and savour. Rather like a good bottle of malt.

And now for a cigarette. Anxiety can be dealt with by a long and expensive and, unfortunately, frequently useless course of therapy. More reliable and far quicker is a glass of wine and a cigarette (of course, as we are constantly reminded, cigarettes may have unwanted side-effects). Simon Gray, the late English playwright, wrote four memoirs. The last, Coda, was written during the final year of his life. He had prostrate and lung cancer, but, for all that, he writes like an angel. He emerges as an observant, intelligent, perhaps self-centred man, blessed with considerable equanimity. While Gray uselessly persists in rationing his cigarettes, he tells us of his journey among the doctors as well as his ordinary day-to-day activities. His beloved wife features as a handmaiden, a mummy and a lover; a dream of a wife.

The smokers among us can take some comfort that he finally died, not from lung cancer, but from a bowel embolism.

Along with the wine and the cigarette, how about some gossip? Me, Cheeta, the purported autobiography of the chimpanzee from Tarzan films, provides scurrilous, and, I fondly hope, truthful gossip about the unbridled sex lives of Hollywood stars. This is a chimp’s-eye view of the world and of us. Cheeta is an artiste and a keen observer. It’s snappy and witty and thoroughly recommended. Great fun.

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