“... 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 ...”

“... a well-established genre. Comp. Lit. 102: readings in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mann, Gide, Sartre (and Martin Amis if time permits); little or no philosophical sophistication required. In the paradigmatic instances, the form is used to show how things look when viewed from the perspective of some or other philosophical assumptions, the philosophy itself being ...”

“... writer is as interesting as reading the works of ‘successful’ ones, like Philip Roth, say, or Martin Amis, who are strong, sure and able. With Brautigan, one sees the fissures, the slapdash detail, the failures of nerve and, of course, the steep decline just at the point when it should all have been going the other way. Brautigan was damaged ...”

“... Stockton, whose only claim to literary eminence is to have been in the same class at school as Martin Amis. But here O’Hanlon sees his angle. Stockton runs a seedy casino in Kensington, and as a photographer specialises in the nude pin-up. His darkroom writhes with portraits of naked girls. From a tree in his back-garden he hangs an image of his ...”

“... suddenly discovered him. Empire of the Sun was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – making Martin Amis feel ‘as if the street drug-pusher had been made chairman of DuPont pharmaceuticals’ – and sold more than all Ballard’s previous books put together, even before it was turned into an Oscar-nominated film by Tom Stoppard and Steven ...”

“... always leads to obscenity and violence. Written hard, in a style that bears the clear influence of Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the memorable and often dazzling story of a ‘wall-shinning, nose-poking, leg-in-the-door’ tabloid hack, a ‘colour man’ sent to the scene of ‘the latest nail-bomb or child-snatch or brutal ...”

“... Doubles, he explored themes of duality, of divided identity, in works ranging from James Hogg to Martin Amis. In Rebecca’s Vest he encounters these same tensions as shapers of his own experience, his own divided self. As he discovers when he comes to read through his adolescent diaries, Miller is both revealer and concealer. His candour is both eager ...”

“... and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at the expense ...”

“... to a close: every few months came a further contribution – not a few of them from the pen of Martin Amis – to a subject which is widely supposed to be exhausted. To suppose it exhausted is not to be unable to suppose that its new works may be pathfinders: the subject presents both faces. At all events, I swallowed my anxieties and tackled The ...”

“... these are occupied by Fay Weldon (‘a small modernised terrace house in Kentish Town’) and Martin Amis (‘a flat in a solid and gabled Victorian edifice ... it looks as if it has just been burgled’). The wisest of all interviewees, though, turns out to be David Lodge. Perhaps he had heard of Haffenden’s obsession, or maybe it you are called ...”

“... to be alone in hinting, if cartoonishly, at its power; as the post-9/11 efforts of John Updike and Martin Amis show, it is easier to reduce ideological belief to pathologies of sexual frustration, or the ordeal of constipation. A self-dissolving post-ideological irony is the dominant mode of the few narratives about Americans engaged in the struggle ...”

“... of many of the most brilliant metaphors make Barnes more like Alan Bennett than he is like Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. Indeed, on page 71 of England, England the following serio-ludicro simile suddenly unfurls: It’s like looking for the tag to unwrap a CD. You know that feeling? There’s a coloured strip running all the way round, and you can ...”

“... writers’ XI would want to sign him on the spot – a sly, last-minute ringer for Melvyn Bragg or Martin Amis. A. is in his early thirties and is presently contributing to magazines in South America. A short story of his appeared in a Cuban anthology published last year. ‘We had help from Spain and the USA,’ he explains. ‘We would like to publish ...”

“... norm during life. Failing that, writers might agitate for pre-publication advances closer to the Martin Amis mark, though I doubt that they’d get them. On the face of it, a greater stress on ‘moral rights’ is not necessarily a bad thing. What, in practical terms, it means is that an author can still object to mistreatment of what remains ...”