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Lionel Asbo: What the dickens, Martin Amis!
Martin Amis is a brilliant writer and he really lets it rip in his novel, Lionel Asbo. The colourful characters could be descended straight from Charles Dickens. Amis writes about the modern English chav with the same gusto as Dickens wrote about Victorian low life.
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Margaret Thatcher and the books of her time
I blogged about Margaret Thatcher and the music of her time and have seen quite a few articles since then about the British pop music scene of that era. One should recall the books, too. It was a grand time for booklovers. P.G. Wodehouse died in 1975, but one could look forward to new books […]
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Martin Amis, 61 today, on ageing
Martin Amis is 61 today. Happy birthday. Here’s his own take on ageing from his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, published this year. Martin Amis – never amiss with words: This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties, you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later […]
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Martin Amis on life and Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis describes seeing his father, Kingsley Amis in a dream in his autobiography, Experience. Published in 2000, five years after his father’s death, it’s one of the most intimate accounts of a father-and-son relationship that I have ever read. He writes: Why should I tell the story of my life? I do it because […]
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Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis
The publication of Martin Amis’ new novel, The Pregnant Widow, has also turned the spotlight on his father, Kingsley Amis. A writer in the Guardian fondly recalled The Old Devils, the Kingsley Amis novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1986. That’s the prize that continues to elude Martin Amis. But that doesn’t detract from […]
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A Truth Universally Acknowledged: About Jane Austen
Janeites will love A Truth Universally Acknowledged, a collection of essays by 33 famous writers and critics acknowledging the genius of Jane Austen. Her admirers will have the pleasure of discovering their feelings shared by writers like Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Somerset Maugham, CS Lewis, JB Priestley, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, David Lodge and critics […]
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Who is Britain’s greatest living author?
Clockwise from top left: Amis, Pinter, Naipaul, Rushdie, Rankin, Stoppard, Rowling and Hornby (in the centre). If Martin Amis isn’t Britain’s greatest living author, who is? asks the Guardian today. Amis is certainly the flashiest. His brilliance with words simply dazzles. No one comes close except Salman Rushdie, whose name also came up in the […]
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Giving Amis a miss
Martin Amis: 2 Yours Truly: 0 I tried reading Martin Amis’ novel, Money, for the second time, and for the second time I failed. I gave up almost near the end, though I did sneak a peek at how it ends. Amis, for all his literary talent (and he is awfully good at words), can […]
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