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“... Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.’ The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the ‘body of literature’: ‘And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You’ll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.’ Alongside these lines was a caricature of ...”

“... sinew poking into hairy holes.’ One grits one’s teeth expecting pages of Gabriel Josipovici or Martin Amis-style prose of defamiliarisation. But, gratefully, the narrative promptly exfoliates into a series of hard and sequential plot lines. Intercut scenes to his deserted wife and house reveal that the traveller is John, an advertising man. John has ...”

“... an institution, a person, writers as apparently different as Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and Martin Amis go for atmosphere, seizing on simple strong images, then orchestrating and art-directing them until they pervade every aspect of a novel like a smell (the mixed metaphors of this sentence perfectly express the sensory confusion so ...”

“... Tsiolkas hands every one of his male characters a hard-on, but in Manolis’s case it’s a tease. Martin Amis said recently that he had originally intended The Pregnant Widow to be an autobiographical novel about sex, but it had proved impossible: the tone didn’t exist; the attempt was embarrassing and disgusting. Even Updike had failed when it came to ...”

“... writer of scrupulously perverse short stories, an output which placed him in a loose grouping with Martin Amis, labelled the ‘neo-nasties’. The nastiness has long since been disowned though the occasional glint of relished cruelty survives – a body part under the furniture in Enduring Love, an almost witty bomb blast in Atonement – to prevent the ...”

“... left – began with the banning of Mars Bars.In the 1980s liking football was, at best, uncool. Martin Amis described the average football fan as having ‘the body and complexion of a cheese and onion crisp’. At its worst it was criminal: Heysel, Hillsborough, Bradford. It was also quite predictable. During Thatcher’s time in office, Liverpool won ...”

“... John Lennon returned his MBE as a protest against the UK’s support of the federal government. Martin Amis, then a university student, was shocked to encounter ‘an incredible reactionary … who supports Nigeria against Biafra’; the same person, it turned out, supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.Even the British understood that there ...”

“... gay for men to blow-dry their hair. This went on for a while until one day he made the point to Martin Amis that it was actually quite gay to sleep with a woman. GQ is gay in that way: it appears to envy women more than lust for them, and its pages are full of tips on how men should depilate, breast-enlarge, slicken, tart up, and generally make ...”

“... are some of the words McCarthy uses, and he likes letting you know that he values Amis, McEwan etc so little that he’s never bothered to read any of their books. Usually, he’s cool about this, but sometimes he sounds furious: ‘Liberals. Liberal humanists. That would be the enemy, in all positions … [The illusion that] there is a self ...”

“... Perchance to Dream (1991), a sequel to The Big Sleep, was hampered by its title, which caused Martin Amis to wonder in the New York Times if Sleep Bigger or The Bigger Sleep would have done the job more effectively. The Black-Eyed Blonde might seem to go too far the other way, but it’s an echt Chandlerism: Banville took it from a list of titles ...”

“... of the Holocaust in a cavalier fashion that would have been unimaginable ten or twenty years ago: Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow, D.M. Thomas in his recent Pictures from an Exhibition, the now banned British comic book, Lord Horror. In the States, businessmen are busily attempting to buy up bits of the Polish concentration camps in order to open Holocaust ...”

“... rather than £24 million (the previous week’s total) or £10 million (the week before that)? As Martin Amis has pointed out in another context, though it is hard to say what difference would be made by having £40 million rather than £20 million at one’s disposal, it is easy enough to see that the difference is a cool £20 million. When the total ...”

“... a pity that James, who can talk with such trenchancy and sense about everything from Mandelstam to Martin Amis, makes such a fool of himself (and of us) when he touches on the literature of his birthplace. His recent overview of Australian poetry in the Times Literary Supplement shows him at his worst – uninformed and wallowing. Even when he affects to ...”

“... a commonplace in post-punk English artworks, in the cinema of Derek Jarman and in the writing of Martin Amis to name just two examples. But thankfully Savage has not the patience for too much metaphor, and quickly hardens the imagery up. That space is a small, oddly-shaped shop at 430 King’s Road, at World’s End ... There is no inside toilet. It ...”

“... Though she was lucky to get such a big advance for her apprentice manuscript – half a dozen of Martin Amis – she set about learning the tricks of the trade from those who knew better, and is still learning. This, her second book, shorter and sharper than her first, is generally a better read. Compared with The Downing Street Years, it has the more ...”