Jake's Thing

Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs and trendy 'workshops', where more than souls are bared.

KINGSLEY AMIS was born in south London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. At one time he was a university lecturer, a keen reader of science fiction and a jazz enthusiast. After the publication ofLucky Jim in 1954, which has become a modern classic, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, includingThe Alteration (1976), winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, The Old Devils (1986), winner of the Booker Prize, andThe Biographer's Moustache (1995), which was to be his last book. He published a variety of other work, including a survey of science fiction entitledNew Maps of Hell (1960); Rudyard Kipling and His World (1975); The Golden Age of Science Fiction (1981);Collected Poems (1979); and his Memoirs (1991). He wrote ephemerally on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. In 1995 Eric Jacobs publishedKingsley Amis, a biography of the distinguished writer, on which Amis himself collaborated. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in 1995.