“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something ...”

“... that it would not otherwise espouse. Here is the unreconstructed ‘engine of comedy’, Rex Martin (‘the famous farting novelist’) and his diminutive son, Felix. Here is ‘Jillian Burnes’, a transsexual romancer. But these knockabout cartoons are absorbed into a chiaroscuro of the forgotten, denizens of the deep recalled and re-remembered. The ...”

“... new Speaker. The advance was $4.6 million: not bad for an untried new writer. The row was not of Martin Amis proportions – this is not a very literary town – but there were some ugly whispers about conflict of interest. Mr Gingrich himself agreed to waive the advance in exchange for a share of royalties that will probably net him about the ...”

“... who want his usual effects – tight plotting, withheld revelations, dark secrets, turning points. Martin Amis is right to consider this long passage McEwan’s best piece of writing: simply at the technical level, it is astonishing to be able to write so well at a slight angle or distance from one’s own customary style, and yet continue to give readers ...”

“... its four main characters, but steadily backwards in time. Not in the too-clever-by-half way that Martin Amis rewinds the life of a Nazi doctor in Time’s Arrow, but by setting the book’s three parts in 1947, 1944 and 1941 consecutively. ‘So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you’ve become,’ the first chapter begins. In 1947 we ...”

“... and beautifully constructed young women’, but in the end it’s a straight-up contest between Martin Amis (‘He only had to stand there and he was in like Flynn’) and Ian Hamilton (who ‘never had to do anything to get a woman he wanted except fight off the ones he didn’t’), with the chronicler represented as sweating enviously yet chastely ...”

“... existential fear and trembling. (Subtext in these opening paragraphs: having inordinate if not Martin Amis-like dental bills of late – on top of all the moving expenses – have decided to come out as auto-odontophobe.) Life really would be simpler without them. Just gum everybody to death. One’s own, one gathers, are going to outlast ...”

“... of most viewers’ and ‘overestimates that of most artists’. (I found myself thinking about Martin Amis – that thing he used to say about ‘the talent elite’.) The art Nelson likes, on the other hand, has spaces in it, gaps and holes, swerves and paradox, opening ‘the possibility – and sometimes the arrival – of a third term into a ...”

“... beginning and end. It made my head hurt. No one had heard of R.H. Blyth and I hadn’t heard of Martin Amis. Monty Python had been replaced with Eddie Izzard. Teenagers said ‘safe’ and ‘sound’ not ‘wack’ and ‘dope’ and listened to drum’n’bass and acid techno (I hadn’t even tried speed or Ecstasy). I found a tiny corner of tokers ...”

“... a sort of demonic gypsy sexuality). He is a very sexy writer. Compared to, say, Ian McEwen or Martin Amis he is not very outspoken: there is something prurient about the way he closes the bedroom door on his couples, a sort of blindfold voyeurism. No doubt this springs from and reflects the claustrophobic puritanism of the society he writes about, a ...”

“... teenage darts prodigy, who stepped onto the world stage this winter as if from the pages of a Martin Amis novel, O’Sullivan’s prodigious talent made him a fan favourite as soon as he turned professional. His personality – anguished, combative, romantic – has only sustained his fame since. His fickleness, too, is legendary. During the 2010 ...”

“... has retained its allure, and its uses. Her work is full of people called things like Bill and Jim. Martin Amis, the subject of Barker’s undergraduate thesis, once wrote that the ‘way a writer names his characters provides a good index to the way he sees the world’. He wondered how people like Tom Metfield and Jane Framsby (from the novels of John ...”