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“... a point. Fifty years later he’s still up in the treetops: he never touches the ground again. Martin Amis began a similar feat of heroic resolve in the 1970s, and whatever you make of his commitment to an all-consuming idea of style, you can’t say he makes things easy for himself up there. In his new book, his 25th, statements like ‘the doorbell ...”

“... Some time ago, Philip Roth remarked that his novels investigate ‘people in trouble’. Though much about his work has changed over the years, his fictional landscapes are still littered with human wreckage. Rage and lust, anxiety and melancholy are the dominant emotions, and all human impulses, even loyalty and affection, tend to career wildly out of control ...”

“... than ‘outrageous’ (the blurb’s word), will fill us with a gloom like that discerned by Martin Scorsese in the worn features of the aging funnyman played by Jerry Lewis in his splendid recent film King of Comedy. The stories in Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of 20 urban fables occupying a point in his work midway between the ...”

“... chocolate), help may still be at hand in the form of literary prizes. The Booker, which despite Martin Amis’s best protests still considers itself ‘Britain’s most prestigious literary accolade’ (whatever that means), won’t be bestowed until 17 October, and the shortlist isn’t due till mid-September, but the hype began to trundle back in ...”

“... Portnoy complained that his life was a Jewish joke, and Philip Roth himself once suggested that American reality beggared the imagination of even the most extravagant novelist. Who could have invented Eisenhower, he asked, and no sooner had he invented a caricature of Richard Nixon in Our Gang than Nixon turned out to be caricaturing himself in the same way, locker-room slang and all ...”

“... Life and Legend (until 22 June). The problem for the exhibition’s organisers – and for Philip Parker, whose book The Northmen’s Fury seems designed to tie in with it – is that we know too much about Vikings already. We know what they looked like: big, hairy, threatening, wearing horned helmets as like as not. We know what they did: rape and ...”

“... know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of Books did? Or how much Martin Amis drinks these days, and where? These scenarios seem unlikely. But perhaps they keep a file on Toni Morrison, who – as a photo that recently went viral made clear – hung out with Angela Davis in the early 1970s, and surely Don DeLillo’s ...”

“... to Ireland was so suppressed as to be historically impossible. It is one of the many merits of Martin Adeney and John Lloyd’s excellent The Miners’ Strike that it, too, has a strong sense of history. As it needs to, since so many of the actors in the 1984-85 miners’ strike were all too conscious of their historical role: Mrs Thatcher and the ...”

“... No one writing about Amis’s life can help but be intimidated by the dazzling presence of Martin Amis’s Experience (2000). An unclassifiable memoir-testament-album-apologia, this deeply clever book is also a love song to his father, whose last years and death it selectively recounts, interweaving other episodes in the son’s life, including ...”

“... the ridiculous blend of deference and denial that goes into the making of public support for it. Philip Ziegler is a historian of uncommon candour and, especially considering the ‘authorised’ nature of his work, unusual humour. Yet in the very first paragraph of his very first page he pitches face-forward into the enduring fallacy that sustains our ...”

“... Amis professed to hate ‘abroad’, but he was only intermittently a cultural nationalist. When Philip Larkin, in his capacity as librarian, canvassed him in 1960 for his views on the export of manuscripts, he received the usual robust reply: I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I ...”

“... even fit all of the moles. The very first Cambridge recruit to the Comintern Intelligence apparat, Philip Spratt, was the withdrawn, heterosexual son of a Deptford elementary schoolmaster, who went to grammar school, won a scholarship to Downing College, read mathematics, had probably never heard of the Apostles, graduated with an ordinary degree, and felt an ...”

“... art with life by imagining him thinking, speaking and writing in perfect print-ready copy. Peter Martin’s introduction to the tercentenary edition of Selected Writings sets up an echo chamber of affirmations of Johnson’s eternal appeal ranging from Ruskin to Beckett to Seamus Heaney to that American avatar of Johnson, Harold Bloom, who places Johnson’s ...”

“... with Bicycle’ by Jane Oxenford and the brief ‘Having taken off my wheels’ by Martin Elliott both associate love and cycling, the first affectedly gloomy and terse, the second too cleverly vivacious. The most valuable juxtaposition pairs two longish stories set in Scotland, David Craig’s ‘Jason and the Green Woman’ and John ...”

“... sleep of reason breeds monsters’: the premise of a genre which knows the dangers of the Unseen. Martin Gregory is an unreliable narrator of the unhappiest kind – one who can’t trust himself (his psychoanalyst’s reports give us at intervals a small purchase on reality). A compulsion from his past overtakes his ordered domestic life, and he finds ...”