Hilary Amis lived in Ann Arbor from 1968 to 1970.
“Shack,” as his friends and colleagues called him, became chair of Latin at the University of Michigan in 1968. He had just married Hilary Amis, former spouse of the novelist Kingsley Amis. She opened a fish-and-chips shop in Ann Arbor called Lucky Jim's, where Shack, behind an ample and snowy chef’s apron, worked the cash register or tended tables. Four of his Harvard colleagues, in a memorial salute to him at a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in May, noted that he was unsuited to domestic life, that the marriage did not last, and that his stepson, Martin Amis [in his 2000 memoir, Experience], found him “a laconic, unsmiling, dumpty-shaped tightwad.”
In 1967 she married Shackleton Bailey, fellow and bursar of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and the following year accompanied him to the United States when he took a professorship in Latin at the University of Michigan. At Ann Arbor she opened a fish and chip shop called Lucky Jim's. But in 1970, during a family holiday in southern Spain, she decided not to return to America and remained in the ancient fortified town of Ronda, forming a relationship with the writer Alastair Boyd, who was running a language school there.
