My Martin Amis

In the basement room of an East London flat one rainy January morning, Jack sat down with the Irish writer Rob Doyle to discuss the publication of his third novel, Cameo, and delve into his long and complex love for the work of Martin Amis.

Rob chose to talk about London Fields, the novel we first encounter on this series through the Financial Times columnist, Janan Ganesh. But whereas Ganesh grew up in Croydon in the late Eighties, with the London Amis depicts in the novel practically on his doorstep, Doyle had never been to England's capital when the cover of London Fields first caught his eye, aged 23, from the shelves of a book exchange at a backpacker's hostel in South East Asia.

On a long bus journey in this far-flung part of the world, Doyle recounts coming to terms with the alchemic mastery of Amis's prose in this 1989 masterpiece. London Fields, he says, blended seamlessly the very highest ideas with the very lowest, all to great comic effect. Writing about London, Amis was engaged in an act of philosophy, dredged up from the deepest pits of urban and human decay.

Rob and Jack go on to discuss that force of nature that is of course Keith Talent. Talent is for Doyle, as he is for Ganesh, not just one of Amis's greatest characters, but one of the greatest characters ever to cast a shadow on the history of English literature. Of all Amis's beleaguered and benighted male creations, Talent is also arguably the happiest, since apart from anything else, he would be the least bothered by Amis's contempt for him.

Later on, Rob and Jack talk about the world Amis so often condemns his male characters to live in. Whether we look to John Self (a man consumed by his own oniomania), the bleak rivalry that sets Keith Talent and Guy Clinch on their fateful course with Nicola Six, or indeed that which Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry must see through a novel later in The Information, Amis's men are rarely sanguine creatures.

Male conflict and humiliation were two of Amis's greatest subjects, but while Doyle still regards Amis as one of the best writers ever to interrogate them in their art, he is less convinced by Amis's opposition outlook on male relationships now, in his forties, than he was as a younger man.

Happy New Year to you, dear listener. 2026 has begun.

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This episode takes Jack Aldane to Manchester, where he meets two men who knew Martin Amis in a rather unique setting. Ian McGuire and John McAuliffe, both esteemed authors, are the co-founders of The Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Not long after establishing this bastion of new literary talent in 2007, the pair began the search for ambassadors to endorse its mission and teach new entrants. In 2006-2007, Martin Amis joined as Iconic Professor of Creative Writing. He was followed in 2011-2012 by Colm Tóibín, who in turn was followed by Jeanette Winterson, who has filled the role since 2013. More recently, the centre has enjoyed the employment of Emma Clarke and Tim Price on its new screenwriting modules.

As its website explains, the centre teaches people "how to write novels, short stories, poems, plays and screenplays", helping students "to read as a writer reads, offer seminars on form and theory, and on contemporary publishing".

Ian and John recount their fondest, funniest memories of working alongside Amis, as well as the political climate after 9/11 that made him more of a political figure than he'd ever been before.

This conversation captures an altogether different look at who Amis was. This is Martin Amis not so much performing for an audience as seeking to impart the best of what he knew to a new generation of writers. This was, as John describes, an "avuncular" Amis, then in his 50s and early 60s, still game for a pint down the local with his students, and with arguably some of his best work still ahead.

And then there was Amis's surprising grasp of the 5 principles of Pilates. If you want understand what that's about, you know what to do.

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In this episode, Jack sits down with the award-winning author and novelist Geoff Dyer at his home to discuss the Good Book of Mart (as distinct from the Big Book of Mart), AKA The War Against Cliché.

Geoff recalls his first encounter with Amis’s fiction, which he read consecutively as a young man, starting with The Rachel Papers in the late 70s and throughout the early 80s, until he was completely blown away by Money in 1984.

Geoff says The War Against Cliché is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him as a writer, not least because the essays contained within make the reader acutely aware of how much fun Amis had with his craft. Amis makes writing seem like the best job in the world, which explains why so many journalists treat The War Against Cliché as a talisman.

As well as the essays that stand out most within this collection, Jack and Geoff imagine what chance Geoff would have stood against Amis on the tennis court, why Geoff was right bring a bag of Amis’s books to a dinner party for signing, what the Amisian ‘aura’ was really all about, and how the publication of Geoff’s new memoir, Homework, gives him pause to reflect on Amis’s achievements with both Experience and Inside Story.

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Ross Barkan is a 35 year-old American journalist and novelist from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His third novel, Glass Century, was published on 6 May 2025.

On a semi-vacation to London this summer, Ross and Jack met to speak about Ross's favourite Martin Amis novel, Inside Story.

This the first episode of the series to deal explicitly, and at length, with Donald Trump.

Looking beyond the playful concept of 'The Maggot Probability' (first coined by Kingsley Amis to explain the degenerative effects of an ageing brain), Ross and Jack discuss Amis's graver concerns about true impact of America's septuagenarian president on its politics and political culture.

As a New Yorker, Ross recognises what he calls Trump's "outer-borough mindset", an attitude of adversity towards the elites of Manhattan who famously paid Trump little serious attention before his meteoric rise to office in 2016 forced them to.

That mindset, he argues, became Trump's calling card to the left behind of America, for whom Washington had come to represent the same den of iniquity and aloofness that the gleaming towers of The Big Apple had to Trump in the 70s and 80s.

And yet, while Amis does not take Trump lightly, Ross says his criticisms of Trump lack the corrosive power of the pen that Amis was otherwise known for. Amis confesses to taking an arch tone on the subject in Inside Story, though says he does so only because Trump is a "sick joke".

It's suggested later in the conversation that while Amis excelled at diagnosing modern pathologies in characters like John Self, he may have bottled it when it came to confronting the real thing in Trump. Does it take a true New Yorker to satirise this century's most controversial Western leader? It may help to read Ross's new novel before answering.

Finally, listen to this episode to discover what Ross took as indispensable writing advice from Amis in Inside Story.

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Vincenzo Barney travelled all the way from Massachusetts to join a panel of eight speakers at the My Martin Amis LIVE show in March this year. If you haven't listened to it already, do go back and hit play.

Since then, Vincenzo has had business on the continent, though he could not return home without first visiting Jack in South London to discuss the book he considers Amis's greatest achievement, The Zone of Interest.

Published in 2014, The Zone of Interest is Amis's fourteenth novel. The story is set in Auschwitz, where a Nazi officer falls in love with the wife of a camp commandant. Told through three narrators: Angelus Thomsen, the officer; Paul Doll, the commandant; and Szmul Zacharias, a Jewish Sonderkommando, its "compendium of epiphanies, appalled asides, anecdotes, and radically condensed history", according to the writer Joyce Carol Oates, makes it arguably one Amis's most compelling works. Upon publication, many called The Zone of Interest Amis's best novel in 25 years.

As well as diving into the widely-praised film adaptation, Vincenzo describes Amis's influence on him as a 29 year-old writer. On the subject of American literary culture more generally, he describes a "suspicion of melody" that he believes harms immersive enjoyment of fiction across the pond.

Listen out in particular for the moment where Vincenzo refers to a phrase Amis uses in The Zone of Interest, which he says he will likely spend the rest of his days trying to match.

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