“... placement by which the aspiring journalist places himself (or herself) alongside the product. Martin Amis got Saul Bellow and Madonna’s anteroom, while Penman grafted the standard profiles with which all the amphetamine gunslingers proved their manhood: Jim Thompson, Harry Dean Stanton and Robin Cook (a.k.a. Derek Raymond). Penman was the writer ...”

“... that the Serbs had – ‘If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em’ – was hailed by Martin Amis as a ‘great sayer of the unsayable’. Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, prompting one judge, Eliot Weinberger, to denounce ...”

“... books?’ That reply always ends a conversation. On the way into the hall on the last night I saw Martin Amis, on assignment for Newsweek, being scanned with a metal detector. I collected my floor pass and headed for stage right, by the West Virginia delegation, who were wearing ‘War on Coal’ pins and mining helmets to remind the nation which state ...”

“... novel, Wild Oats (1979), included a number of sentences taken straight from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. These plagiarists, he found, nearly always used the notebook defence: they’d copied out passages by authors they admired into their notebooks, but forgot to add quotation marks and attributions; this material then somehow got mixed up with ...”

“... Kingsley Amis has a reputation for not liking other people, but – these so-called Memoirs might seem to permit us to enquire – does anyone, could anyone, like him? Is Kingers himself, at the end of the day, the sort of bloke you’d want to run into at – well, at the end of the day, at the club, or the pub, or at some crappy dinner party? On the face of it, no thank you ...”

“... needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as normal or exceptional. It is, for example, perfectly true to say ...”

“... London sparrow (gone, vanished) which puts in a rather showy appearance in the opening sequence of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog. Amis is working so hard, as is the sparrow, to be live, engaging, on-the-money; the throwaway charm is so affected, so sub-Keatsian, that the inevitable violence that follows makes for a very ...”

“... it.In 1983, Emecheta was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, alongside Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. In the photo, she sits above Kazuo Ishiguro in a red and black checked dress with her hands clasped, the sole woman of colour. The following year her daughter Chiedu died of anorexia nervosa at the age of 23. She became the ...”

“... The last letter​ Philip Larkin wrote was to Kingsley Amis on 21 November 1985. He was too ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it ...”

“... as ‘popular’. The ‘popular’ writers are people like Arnold Wesker, H.E. Bates, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. Needless to say, the idioms which the BBC, the newspapers and the ‘popular’ writers are free to indulge in are those which pass the cultural censorship which dictionary-makers themselves exercise. So there is no breaking out of the ...”

“... after 9/11, the lens through which self-styled defenders of the liberal-democratic West like Martin Amis chose to view Islam. In this version of Western liberalism, it seems enough to posit the defence of individual liberty as the highest task of politics, and then dismiss all other political traditions as illiberal, or even fanatical. A less ...”

“... that of the early 19th century, or James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis (all OED2 authors) that of today. The opposite is true: we should expect the language of these writers to stand out in a contrasting way from current usage, although this will obviously vary from writer to writer and indeed from word to word. But ...”

“... For anyone with a teenage daughter their scabrous subject-matter is hard to take. They would scare Martin Amis. It needed a true appreciation of literary talent to spot their quality. The same true appreciation ensures that the prose in the LRB rarely falls below a certain standard and that the level of argument is kept up. Not all of the best LRB writers ...”

“... frequency by people who should know better. North Koreans are not a ‘zombie nation’ (Martin Amis), an undifferentiated mass of ‘racist dwarfs’ (Christopher Hitchens), but 24 million individuals, as virtuous and vicious as the rest of us, and just as keen on sweet and sticky snacks. The Choco Pie story also reveals a susceptibility to ...”

“... and she did not find the process easy, but then she seems to have been overtaken with what Martin Amis (apropos of Brideshead Revisited) has called the ‘great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and … deep conviction’ one needs in order to construct ‘the really good bad book’. The achievement left her exhausted, creatively beached. In John ...”