• Kingsley Amis
If there were a category of underrated books of the year, Elizabeth Jennings's Collected Poems (Carcanet) would be my number-one choice. From the first (the earliest pieces here date in fact from the mid-1940s) she has shown herself to be a poet who really has a personal vision along with the gift of making it immediate and shareable. What is no less rare, her verse has its own idiom and its own flavour. It will go on lasting when showier presences have departed.
Trillion Year Spree (Gollancz), by Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove, is an exhaustive history of science fiction that is also a scrapbook of comments on technolo- gy, politics, publishing, Western society, psychology and all manner of odd bits of literature. The beginnings of the genre are identified, very persuasively, in the Gothic novel, particularly Frankenstein. The end is not in sight, according to the authors. Well, it wouldn't do if we all thought the same.
Keith Waterhouse's little book, The Theory and Practice of Lunch (Michael Joseph), is a relentlessly opinionated and very entertaining encyclopaedia of horrible restaurants, waiters, dishes, chefs, drinks, proprietors, menus, guests and co- lunchers. I can't imagine, let alone remem- ber, a meal out anywhere that would meet all his requirements, but his chronicle of their frustration is irresistible.
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