Rediscovering Martin Amis

The ghost of Martin Amis looms over his obituarists. You can imagine him seeing their clichés — “renowned author”, say, or “capturing the zeitgeist” — and wincing. God only knows what he would have thought of it being claimed that he has “lost his battle with oesophageal cancer”. It was his best friend Christopher Hitchens who said that when you are dying of cancer “the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you”.