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“... spirit of a murdered Mongolian girl, an art thief in St Petersburg, a London bloke à la Martin Amis who works as a drummer and ghostwriter, a pacifist Defense Department scientist on the run from the CIA, and a New York DJ who keeps his voice on air through what turns out not to be a nuclear apocalypse. It is all done with panache: the stories ...”

“... he says of one of the Femintern members, sounding less like a Parisian intellectual than a Martin Amis hero. Will, however, is married to a psychoanalyst of East European origin, who lives in France and teaches in New York. He is the friend of Paul Fals (the ‘Trotsky of psychoanalysis’), Laurence Lutz (a philosopher who strangles his wife) and ...”

“... rise of the writer as cynosure; with fame comes responsibility, it seems, for even bad boys like Martin Amis speak of their world sorrow, while, elsewhere, playwrights and poets take power. Long gone the days of anti-social surrealist anarchy among writers, when Breton and his kind acclaimed psychotics as heroes and spat on morality, private and ...”

“... while the juggernaut comes thundering on with a red-eyed ghoul at the wheel. And wait, there’s Martin Amis in the cab beside him, with a frozen alcopop in one hand and an unread novel by Victor Serge in the other. Which is another problem: few of Hitchens’s friends are as clever, or fastidious, or well read, or hungry for the telling detail, as he ...”

“... observations, an ‘unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false’ – as Martin Amis said of Desmond ‘the Naked Ape’ Morris – are rammed home with the trademark Wolfe intensifiers: caps, italics, exclamation marks. All the while, the reader has the bullied sense that This Is How It Is, because Wolfe has done the research ...”

“... Eliot with something in Nabokov, Kundera or Lawrence. We hear of Raine’s friends, James Fenton, Martin Amis; of Heaney’s Station Island; harshly of Walcott: ‘In Omeros (Chapter XII), you can see Derek Walcott’s botched, fatally indebted copy of Eliot when he describes his encounter with his father Warwick’s ghost: Eliot’s drained pool full of ...”

“... as he put it himself. ‘People assume it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones,’ Martin Amis complained a few years back. ‘Coetzee, for instance – his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure … I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent.’ It ought not to be necessary, at this point in Coetzee’s ...”

“... All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities. It was good advice – and not only because they brought her solid sales and secured her popularity. The material of the chronicles seems like Howard’s ...”

“... mast in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.* Zachary Leader, formerly the biographer of Kingsley Amis, prudently avoided such horn toots of hubris in the amassing of his two-volume Life of Bellow, the authorised and definitive biography that groans with the graven heft of stone tablets. He doesn’t make this undertaking about him. As monumental as ...”

“... Anyone who subscribes to the doctrine of victimology (for every murderer there is a murderer, as Martin Amis puts it) gives some quarter to the powers of darkness. But no one reading this book can fail to overlook its most distressing irony: the Sawards finally got themselves more publicity than any family could ever possibly want – or ...”

“... hysteria, but can only manage a rather smutty slapstick. Detectable here is the influence of Martin Amis, whose gleeful nastiness in the bedroom has become quite a touchstone for many youngish male novelists. The book is elsewhere littered with sentences that are straight Amisian repro: ‘Then there was money: it seemed money had taken a look at ...”

“... another Alcott buff, for what is described as a seven-figure advance. (Eat your heart out, Martin Amis.) Part of the mystery is why the Pratt family, and the Houghton Library, so underestimated the worth of the manuscript; by these accounts, Bicknell has made a killing (he’s giving some of the money to his school, and some to the Louisa May ...”

“... chance that you would have met her in some club or at some party, or even on the pavement outside. Martin Amis remembers her showing up at the end of a dinner, on the arm of Nicholas Soames, and seating herself at the piano to sing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (to which, of course, the only answer was ‘no he ain’t’). Two members of the New Left ...”

“... Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Lawrence Shainberg’s Brain Surgeon and ‘the works of Primo Levi, in particular If this is a man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved and Moments of ...”

“... liable to wonder at the nullity of things – money, drugs, sex, success, America, the list of Martin Amis titles. They have come to him and he enjoys them, but at the same time, in some deep way, he wishes they hadn’t. Crossing is the book of an unhappy Midas, a man unable to come to terms with this century and what he has done himself in order to ...”