---

Jix Dixon has a terrible job at a second-rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without. If he can just deliver a lecture on Merrie England, a moderately successful career surely awaits him. But without luck, life is never simple...

---

´His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he´d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.´

Jix Dixon has a terrible job at a second-rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without: the tedious and ridiculous Professor Welch, a neurotic and unstable girlfriend, Margaret, burnt sheets, medieval recorder music and over-enthusiastic students. If he can just deliver a lecture on ´Merrie England´, a moderately successful career surely awaits him. But without luck, life is never simple . . .

---

A brilliant and preposterously funny book Guardian

---

Kingsley Amis was born in London in 1922, educated at City of London School and St John´s College, Oxford, and worked for a time as a university lecturer. Following the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954 he wrote over twenty novels, including The Alteration (1976), The Old Devils (1986), winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer´s Moustache (1995), which was to be his last book. He published a variety of other work, writing about politics, education, language, films, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis received a knighthood in 1990, and died in October 1995.

---