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“... The 1990s don’t yet have a mood. They may forever be defined by the style they preceded, what Martin Amis, rather horrifically, called Horrorism. Others may see it as a last golden age of selling the silver and weeping over Diana and burning the dead cows, a Blairite meandering into the chaos of international worries. It sometimes takes a while for a ...”

“... nothing finally preponderates, no sensation remains, no vision, no synthesis, no understanding. Amis has made everything somehow ‘come out even’: the historical substrates of the book (Wannsee, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Nuremberg, all alluded to) and its flimsy fictional superstructure; true extermination and flip invention; horrific fact and diligent if ...”

“... going to Glasgow to visit a friend; he is taking the whole week off to write a review of the new Martin Amis novel. What with Hanif Kureishi and Martin Amis it’s surprising I have any confidence left. On Thursday morning I went to see Jill at the Polish Club. This is where I’ll have the launch party. I ...”

“... the poor, most other writers, other people in general and, much of the time, himself. Kingsley Amis, the addressee of many colourful Larkin bulletins, had written to his pen pal in 1956 of the ‘feast … awaiting chaps when we’re both dead and our complete letters come out’. He was, he said, vastly amused by the debates occasioned by Motion’s ...”

“... or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays only). ‘It is ...”

“... In February 1987, partly to finance the purchase of a larger house, Kingsley Amis sold his papers (483 catalogued items) to the Huntington Library in Southern California. 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 have no feeling one way or the other about such bidder’s country of origin ...”

“... left in the innocence bank; we are rich on suspicion. In literature, contemporary examples abound. Martin Amis, for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information. Richard Tull, a novelist, hears birds singing in his garden, and thinks, mournfully: ‘say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from ...”

“... on working in obscurity and breaking out in unfamiliar fashion on the page. Miller writes on Martin Amis as ‘the latest of Anglo-America’s dualistic artists’ for whom ‘the world wavers,’ as we read in Money, and ‘people are doubling.’ Maybe so, but taken in this spirit the process becomes banal, in the novel or out of ...”

“... movement of course) was much rarer because harder to do. A good writer in this genre, such as Martin Amis, succeeds in raping the ‘now’ by means of a philistine main character, who brutishly makes clear the sourness and the nowness of our time. Modernity’s awareness of itself must hit the reader through the pretence of utter indifference to any ...”

“... Primary Colors, whoever the author, is a first novel. If so, it’s the best fictional debut since Martin Amis. There isn’t a slack line or a flat character in the book; even walk-ons like the Stanton family doctor, ‘thin almost to the point of consumption, and tilted somehow, like the Tower of Pisa, wearing a cape and a hat and small round ...”

“... in his letter about Freud in this issue of the LRB, and by John Lanchester in his piece about Martin Amis. The note about Bartlett (who is identified as the ‘author’ of the book and owns the copyright) seems intended merely to spread a murky film over the question of whether or not this is really the work of Eva Braun. Bartlett claims that the ...”

“... Fiction in the Eighties’† – the very fiction which he supposes not to matter. Kingsley Amis is present there as a ‘joke figure of the right’ who once asserted that ‘more will mean worse’ in the field of educational provision, and whose novels have got worse in the course of his thirty-five years of production. Taylor likes inverted ...”

“... of its male contributors used the phrase ‘my wife’. I made a dive for the most famous name – Martin Amis – and found myself reading a wafer-thin reminiscence about flying on a 737 which has to make an emergency landing. Amis describes his sensation as being ‘mainly, relief that my wife and child weren’t with ...”

“... prone to the overstatement of youth but this is the real thing. The voice here is like that of Martin Amis, whose mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal ...”

“... 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 ...”