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“... and lacks confidence in his aesthetic judgments (something that attracts him to his great friend Martin Amis is that Amis has no problem telling him what sorts of book he should like). But Hitchens has complete confidence in his political judgments, which are robust, intensely felt and invariably propped up by vast ...”

“... Everyman Lolita, incidentally, somebody seems to have had a rush of blood to the head: in my copy Martin Amis’s Introduction doesn’t precede but actually replaces the Foreword by John Ray Jr, PhD, Nabokov’s taunting impersonation of a suavely clueless psychiatrist. It’s as if an editor looked at the book and thought, we don’t need this John Ray ...”

“... outset you find within a couple of pages The Great Tradition, A Girl in Winter, a poem by Kingsley Amis, Four Quartets, Brideshead Revisited, Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Cooper, Angus Wilson, Horizon, architectural Modernism and the Festival of Britain. Just as you think something important is going to be left out it turns up: the bourgeois intellectual ...”

“... he dismissed this as a relic of a past life occasionally glimpsed in anecdotes of drinking with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, or lunching with Mick Jagger. He maintained he had done nothing to earn his credit for years, and as a result it took me a long time to recognise how considerable his contribution had been. The range of his two dozen ...”

“... and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most naturally, and most amusingly, ironic. And Iris Murdoch has written repeatedly that the definition of the great novel is the free and realised life it gives to its ...”

“... poncy twats intae thinkin that ehs some kind ay fuckin artiste.’ There’s even a brief swipe at Martin Amis, the last person you’d expect to meet in an Irvine Welsh novel. Strangely enough, Filth – with its self-immolating and self-deceiving narrator, exaggerated misogyny and bodily horror, slow-burning running gags, comic set-pieces, ego-bruising ...”

“... for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At ...”

“... even mention him in his new survey of post-war fiction. In the late Fifties and after, Kingsley Amis, Johns Wain and Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Co struck a new, demotic note. The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a ...”

“... edited by Peter Quennell has some attractive photographs and two good essays, by John Bayley and Martin Amis. For the rest, there is a lot of laborious exegesis, which might have amused the recipient of the tribute, and a thought-provoking piece by Alfred Appel Jr, who knew Nabokov well and is steeped in his work. The thought provoked is that the effect ...”

“... his creed, and they spread his news around the world. One such disciple was his other good friend Martin Amis (‘the only blond I have ever really loved’), who so completely assimilated the doctrine that a final battle was underway between civilisation and darkness that for years he could write about nothing else. A charge often levelled against ...”

“... child – returns from Iraq to a Sykes family wedding. The fourth, set in 2015, features a Martin Amis-esque writer called Crispin Hershey, ‘a short, unfit novelist in his late forties’, with a famous dad, a talent for mindless provocation and a first novel called Desiccated Embryos. He attends various literary festivals around the ...”

“... fluency. It’s this evenness of texture that is the basis for the charge that he writes too well. Martin Amis has described the effects created by Updike’s prose as being like cinematography – ‘rich, ravishing, and suspiciously frictionless’. The most memorable piece of Prac Crit performed on Updike comes from Mailer’s novel Tough guys don’t ...”

“... fulfilment is not feasible in modern America. An English writer who sees America this way is Martin Amis. His recent collection of ‘Visits to America’, The Moronic Inferno, contains pieces dealing with money mania, prime-time religion, and the phenomenon of media celebrity; and his last novel, Money, about the corrupting power of the stuff, is ...”

“... The first million-selling paperback was Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters in 1956, while Kingsley Amis received £100 for Lucky Jim. There is a wonderful description by a friend of Virginia Woolf’s who arrived at her flat to find Woolf and Edith Sitwell, between whom relations were somewhat strained, sitting companionably together on the sofa ‘like two ...”

“... logorrhoeic narrator, gazing out over millennial London, mimicked the verbal tics and fireworks of Martin Amis, we are now in country-pub Kingsley territory. But as Hugh delves into the mystery of his mother’s disappearance, remembering his malarial visions of her at his bedside, and investigating the local legend of the ‘Red Lady’ believed to be ...”