One Fat Englishman is in hindsight a devastating and prophetic self-portrait of Kingsly Amis. Conscious in the early 1960s of the way his values and opinions were changing, and, half-appalled himself at the process, projected them into a fictional character he could simultaneously identify with and condemn. It now seems obvious that Roger Micheldene’s character’s promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking certainly had autobiographical sources

As you can imagine his casual infidelities were a constant source of friction between him and his wife. Apparently in 1962, when he would have been working on One Fat Englishman, his wife discovered an affair and whilst on holiday, when he had  fallen asleep on the beach, she wrote on his exposed back in lipstick: “1 FAT ENGLISHMAN I FUCK ANYTHING”.

The books image is of most interest to me, you do not get to see the character but immediately understand his vulgarity. The breath of the belly and the swirls of hair. No facial features are needed for this portrait. Peculiar is the way that he holds the delicate silver implement with British insignia in the midst of his sausage fingers. Fantastic, well done Penguin!