Amis had a quicksilver mind and a ruthless dedication to the beauty of the written word. While controversies swirled around key moments in his personal and literary life—marriage and divorce, sky-high book advances, his family’s relocation from London to Brooklyn—all of them proved irrelevant, in the end. What really counted was the exuberance of his language (the lorry “barnacled in rust” and “whining for purchase”).