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4. All sweet drinks are bad. (People will usually have drunk them with a pudding or after a large meal, anyway having mixed their drinks earlier by switching from gin to sherry to table wine (say) and going on doing so with whisky or beer. Hence the (b) superstition above.) Also smoking, bad ventilation, exertion such as dancing, fatigue from staying up late, rich food.

5. No, not at all. Alcohol “depresses,” reduces activity of, the nervous system, i.e. is a sedative, a relaxant. Nothing to do with psychological depression.

6. True. Some heavy drinkers eat little or no protein, thus starving the liver. You can get the same result by drinking no alcohol but eating nothing but boiled sweets, say.

7. False. The affliction is mainly hereditary. Gin notoriously relieves it (see Gin, a 5).

8. A glass of milk or tablespoon of olive oil will delay absorption and effectively slow your intake.

9. (a) Rest, a warm bath, fresh air, a mild alkaline like Vichy water, bread and honey (to raise blood sugar).

(b) Fruit-juice especially if chilled, a cold shower, coffee, a hair of the dog, anything like a Prairie Oyster (brandy, tabasco, raw egg-yolk), any rich, greasy or spicy food, aspirin (hard on the stomach).

10. From an emphatic form of “total” current at the time (1830s) of the first such movement. A teetotal abstainer was pledged to take no alcohol at all, not merely to eschew spirits.

Solution to question: You will find the intruder at the foot of the answers to q 9 . No Sen-nacherib. He was King of Assyria in the seventh century bc and is mentioned in the Bible and a poem by Byron, but never had a bottle named after him.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS

Lucky Jim

That Uncertain Feeling

I Like It Here

Take a Girl Like You

One Fat Englishman

The Anti-Death League

I Want It Now

The Green Man

Girl, 20

The Riverside Villas Murder

Ending Up

The Alteration

Jake’s Thing

Russian Hide and Seek

SHORT STORIES

My Enemy’s Enemy

Collected Short Stories

VERSE

A Case of Samples

A Look Round the Estate

Collected Poems 1944–1979

GENERAL

New Maps of Hell: A Survey of

Science Fiction

The James Bond Dossier

What Became of Jane Austen?

And Other Questions

Rudyard Kipling and His World

Harold’s Years (ed.)

The New Oxford Book of

Light Verse (ed.)

The Faber Popular Reciter (ed.)

The Golden Age of Science Fiction (ed.)

WITH ROBERT CONQUEST

Spectrum I, II, III, IV, V (ed.)

The Egyptologists

Praise for Everyday Drinking

“These books are so delicious they impart a kind of contact high; they make you feel as if you’ve just had the first sip of the planet’s coldest, driest martini . . . A reminder of how good all of Amis’s writing was about being what he called a ‘drink-man’: smart, no-nonsense and, above all else, charming.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

“There has never been a more charming, erudite, eager, generous and devoted lover of drink—to judge by his writing—than Kingsley Amis.” — New York Times Book Review

“If you are seeking a requiem for the pub culture and all that it meant, then this is the book for you. It will not console you for the loss, but it will teach you how to be rude about it, with that inimitable rudeness that Kingsley perfected and which was the breast-plate across a warm, vulnerable and thoroughly decent heart.” — Guardian (UK)

“Kingsley Amis’s drink writing is better than anybody else’s, ever.”

—Esquire

“Thoroughly worthwhile reading. Amis was incapable of constructing a dull sentence. His writing was consistently clear, lively, and precise (surely the envy of any who pursue this exacting trade) and above all very, very funny . . . His style is always jaunty and cheerful, with something of a modern Wodehouse about it . . . Curmudgeon is the word that is used—perhaps overused—to describe Kingsley Amis . . . But from these three little books alone, he emerges as an intelligent, likable, honest, and excellently funny fellow.”

—Alexander Waugh, Bookforum

“Among Amis’s literary output the journalism on drinking, recently collected and published with an introduction by (who