The monster we hate to love

What is it about fruit? There is no more searing passage in the memoirs of Auberon Waugh than the bit when three bananas reach the Waugh household in the worst days of postwar austerity and Evelyn Waugh places all three on his own plate, then before the anguished eyes of his three children ladles on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and scoffs the lot. So in all the 900-odd pages of this marvellous Life of Kingsley Amis there is nothing that chills the blood more than the moment when Hilly Amis’s eight-year-old son Jaime reaches for the one peach in a fruit bowl otherwise containing only oranges, apples and grapes and Kingsley shouts, in a voice described by his son Martin as ‘like a man hailing a cab across the length of Oxford Circus during a downpour on Christmas Eve’, ‘HEY! That’s my peach.’