25 NOVEMBER 1995, Page 42

Of no fixed index

Sir: Pace Peregrine Worsthome (Diary, 18 November) my friend John Wain died three years after the publications of Kingsley Amis's memoirs, so his snide comments were on the living, not the dead, perhaps even crueller for that reason.

John never read the Amis book but was planning to insert Amis Kingsley in the index of his own — sadly unwritten — auto- biography, but with no page numbers cited nor references to Amis in the text. This would have been an elegant and economi- cal way of making his own view of Amis quite clear.

Graham Tayar

25 Fortress Road, London NW5