He loathed experimental fiction (he would have been furious, but unsurprised, that the centenary of Ulysses has overshadowed his own), prompting his son Martin Amis to express puzzlement that “someone … as linguistically aware as my father should never have sought to experiment in prose at all.”

But such is Amis père’s command of English that his prose carries the same kind of charge and invigorating freshness as that of the great Modernists. He is straightforward but always surprising.

This is most apparent in his great comic riffs, depending for their effect on the choice and arrangement of words, the brilliant deployment of repetition and qualification, as in his description of a very drunk man trying to read a book in Ending Up: “New characters kept on making unceremonious appearances, or, more exactly, he would find that he had been in a sense following their activities for several pages without having noticed their arrival, or, more exactly still, they would turn out, on consultation of the first couple of chapters, to have been about the place from the start.”

But, great comedian though he was, Amis could also do all the other things we ask of a novelist: frighten, disgust and, yes, move. He is at his most touching in The Old Devils, the novel that netted him the Booker in 1986 – and one that shows that he was capable of writing rounded and sympathetic female characters.

Nowadays we are supposed to be amazed at the provincialism – geographical and artistic – that enabled the Booker jury to award the prize to a novel about elderly Welsh drunks instead of Margaret Atwood’s modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale.

Certainly, The Handmaid’s Tale occupies a more important place in modern literature than The Old Devils. But luckily for one Old Devil, the jury must have agreed with one of Amis’s wisest pronouncements: “Importance isn’t important. Only good writing is.”

Essential Amis: Five to read

Lucky Jim (1954)

Amis’s first novel, renowned for its detailed description of a hangover (“His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum…”)

Take a Girl Like You (1960)

Features one of Amis’s most sympathetic women characters, working-class teacher Jenny Bunn, and one of his most memorable cads, her would-be seducer Patrick Standish.

The Green Man (1969)

Chilling as well as hilarious, this homage to MR James finds ghosts haunting the grumpy Amis-esque proprietor of a centuries-old coaching inn.

Jake’s Thing (1978)

Is this story of a middle-aged Oxford don trying to recover his lost libido a satire on women or misogynists – or both? You may laugh guiltily, but laugh you will.

The Amis Collection (2022)

This anthology of essays celebrates Evelyn Waugh, Jelly Roll Morton and Billy Bunter while leaving Dylan Thomas, Socialism and British higher education bleeding.

To order ‘Collected Poems’ and ‘The Amis Collection’, visit books.telegraph.co.uk