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That Uncertain Feeling is a comic novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1955.

In 1961, the book was made into a film starring Peter Sellers, with the title changed to Only Two Can Play, to avoid confusion with similar contemporary titles. It was also adapted by the BBC in 1986 as a television series, starring Denis Lawson and Sheila Gish, this time with the original title.

Plot

A satire on life and culture in a Welsh seaside town, the story concerns a married librarian who begins an affair with the bored wife of a local bigwig. Amis, an English incomer to Swansea in real life, mocks Wales's devotion to culture and learning as false and pretentious. In The Old Devils, one of the central characters, the writer Alun Weaver, is portrayed as a "stage-Taffy"; Weaver is the memoirist of a fictional Welsh poet based loosely on Dylan Thomas.

References

1. Nick Bentley (2007). Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Peter Lang. p. 303. ISBN 978-3-03910-934-0.
2. Films and Filming. Hansom Books. 1966. p. 20.
3. Jeffrey Richards (15 September 1997). Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad's Army. Manchester University Press. p. 227. ISBN 978-0-7190-4743-5.
4. Merritt Moseley (1993). Understanding Kingsley Amis. Univ of South Carolina Press. pp. 155. ISBN 978-0-87249-861-7.

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• 1955 British novels
• Novels about infidelity
• British comedy novels
• British novels adapted into films
• Novels set in Wales
• Novels by Kingsley Amis
• Victor Gollancz Ltd books
• 1950s novel stubs