In his clef-ish novel of London literary life, Brilliant Creatures (1983), Clive James said of the Hitchens-based character that the phrase 'no whit abashed' might have been invented for him. Grandmother Dodo's disclosure had not rendered Israel any less mechanistic or expansionist or quasi-democratic. I found this totally boring but probably just don't know who enough of the semi-famous people involved are for it to be juicy.

In all other respects, Blacker thought the book masterly: "In a deceptively cunning narrative weave, casting backwards and forwards from his childhood to his middle age, from his father's marriages to his own, he worries away at the polarities of innocence and experience, love and death. A third of the way through, I thought it would be one of my favourite recent reads; two-thirds of the way through, I'd run out of steam and had to take a break. I suppose Forster is also on target and I should feel that Amis connected with me, the reader, though I'm not sure I welcome such. Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures.So there is some incredible writing and good anecdotes and analysis and fun literary name-dropping, but there are also portions that just didn't feel print-worthy to me, and there are too many points where Martin gifts us with some breaking news -- e. It's a good enough read, and an entertaining one, and certainly of interest to anyone who is interested in Kingsley Amis and Martin's relationship with his father.

Thinking more about Martin Amis these days on reading some of his essays and shuffling around Inside Story to read shortly. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with Herzog, with Henderson, with Humboldt, frowning, nodding, withholding, qualifying, objecting, conceding - and smiling, smiling first with reluctant admiration, then smiling with unreluctant admiration. His teeth are too good… It’s not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov. The second part is mainly about his father's dying and increasingly I realised this was more a biography of dad than of Martin, perhaps to show dad's biographer that he hadn't always got it right and that the son knew far more.The fact of the matter, of the fact of the matter (of the matter), is that Amis is a towering presence in the field of lit-crit: the sharpest and smartest Nero of criticism working in Britain right now, with almost four decades of experience under his belt. ho trovato viceversa, in questo libro, molta onestà intellettuale e una dose sufficiente di autoironia perché l’inevitabile riferimento, per esempio, agli scrittori e ai personaggi frequentati fin da quando era bambino non finisca per scivolare in odore di name-dropping. If only he'd stuck to writing about smoking, shagging and snooker, on the other hand, he might even have been the next Nick Hornby.

I sat with my head in my palms, staring at the aftermath of the dinner-that evening's road smash, with its buckled headlights, its yawning hinges, its still-oscillating hubcap. This unbiased account of a controversial man so close to his heart is an achievement that I feel Amis worthy of unadulterated praise for. Emotions, atavisms, would be set aside, while reason- the nabob of all the faculties- went about its work. Admittedly this was a major trauma, but surely other events from earlier on warrant similar coverage.The voice doesn’t help – that interminable transatlantic drawl with its considered hesitations and self-important emphases. I disliked its spleen, smugness, resentment and lack of self-knowledge, the marks of the pampered and the overpraised down the ages. con la differenza, rispetto ai romanzi, che qui abbassando ovviamente l’asticella del sarcasmo martin amis mostra come sa praticare la chirurgia dell’intelligenza anche quando non ci sono freddezza e distacco. Experience is a portmanteau of personal history, ancestor worship and promiscuous opinionizing, and a pinata of literary gossip that Amis beats with a stick, causing many names to drop. Ian Hamilton, in the Sunday Telegraph, contrasted the pained, middle-aged Amis with the confident youth who had enjoyed instant literary success in the 1970s.