Searching for political opinions in the life and work of Amis is like chasing ghosts. There are suggestions, rumours, apparent facts, but the more we attempt to verify and substantiate them the more diffuse they become. We know that he flirted with communism at school and during his first year at Oxford. He was a supporter and occasional member of the Labour Party during the late forties and fifties. In 1957 he published a leftish pamphlet on Socialism and the Intellectuals; by 1967 he had changed his mind about the attractions of Labour and published another on ‘Why Lucky Jim turned Right’; and in An Arts Policy? (1979) he committed himself to the cultural policies of the new Thatcher government. Read these and you will find that Amis has not really changed at all. His views on the touchstones of postwar political conflict – nationalization, the welfare state, the cold war – are unfixed and contingent. His real reasons for changing sides had nothing to do with the specifics of the British economy or Britain's position in international politics: in terms of its realpolitik the Labour Party of the late sixties and early seventies was in any case largely indistinguishable from the Conservatives. Amis's distaste for left-wing politics was fuelled by his perception of socialism as an overarching solution to the question of how life might be made better for everyone. Throughout his life he remained committed to elements of Labour policy that corresponded with his specific personal beliefs – he detested racism and capital punishment particularly – but he disliked anything that resembled a formula, anything which claimed to explain or diagnose the human condition.

In his novels this fickle and detached political stance manifested itself in a number of ways. Lucky Jim became associated with a variety of cultural and political trends of the 1950s, although the Angry Young Men and the Movement were anything but united as ideological groupings. The poetry of the Movement was traditional in its style and often regional in its frame of reference, but it carried no attendant political resonances – unless one interprets anti-modernism as a right-wing stance.