Tegan Bennett-Daylight

I've just never met them.

I've just never met them.

I can't get close to what his idea of a woman is.

I mean, I never stop myself from reading a book because it holds a worldview that I don't share because that would be ridiculous and I would read virtually nothing.

So I've read Martin Amis for a really long time and certainly London Fields was a really, really important book to me when I was a young writer.

He just, he can be so thrilling on the page and his literary criticism is just

peerless I learned so much from him but this one it reminded me of something actually that Geordie may even have said to me when we first met many years ago I said to him idly what happened to Martin Amis and he said booze and I've never really forgotten that because I feel a kind of fragmenting in Amis that yeah just he's to me he's not a writer at the top of his game

Well, I actually do think that Martin Amis is one of the great readers and I can read him endlessly on literature.

He does what a really great critic should do, which is that he extends the work with his own prose.

So he is able to describe what a writer does, but he's also able to embody and enlarge what they do.

Having said that, he is a superb hatchet job writer as well.

So he can take down a writer faster and more efficiently than any other writer I've read.

So I'll read his literary criticism endlessly because he's not just clever.

that really, really appealing.

That's a beautiful little reading, Geordie.

I think also the thing that I've neglected to say is that I'm not sort of putting Amos against other writers.

If I'm in a room covered in books...

and I see a Martin Amis book, I'm very likely to reach for it first, second or third above other books because I know, I know I'll always be engaged.

Whatever it is, whatever he's writing about, I know there'll be something, something that I want to see on the page.