ABSTRACT
A man creeps back home after an adulterous assignation, ‘feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap’ (Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling, London, Victor Gollancz, 1955). (‘Rakehell’ is an archaic term for a debauchee or rake.) The paradox has been extracted from Amis’s novel by Richard Moran (see Further Reading below).
