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MI5 monitored author Kingsley Amis after an intercepted letter described him as a “very promising” member of the Communist Party while at Oxford, according to the Telegraph.
A newly-declassified dossier reveals the Secret Service asked local constabularies for reports on the young academic and quizzed his Army commanders about his conduct.
According to the Telegraph, the documents released from the National Archives in Kew suggests Army superiors took a “dim view” of the Lucky Jim author as a “deliberate contrarian”. However the files also show intelligence officers noted his later withdrawal from Communist beliefs.
The academic and novelist, and father of Martin Amis, was allegedly first flagged to MI5 in 1942 when an intercepted letter mentioned his role in the Communist Party’s Oxford branch. There were also reports two years later that he had been receiving regular supplies of the Communist newspaper Daily Worker.
He was placed under MI5 “observation” whilst he was an officer during the Second World War and later in a memo to MI5's Lt Col John Baskervyle-Glegg, Amis' commander said he had not found the young officer to have a "particularly inspiring personality".
He added: "He is obviously well-read, but a bit young and inexperienced in the ways of the world.”
A series of press cuttings from the file records Amis’s falling out with Communism in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.
Writing in 1957 to the Daily Worker, now the Morning Star, Amis described how he had rejected Marxism and cut off his Communist friends.
Amis went on to write more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry and a number of scripts, short stories as well as pieces of criticism. He married fellow novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1963 and they divorced 20 years later. He was knighted in 1990 and died in 1995 aged 73.