Many a male Amis reader owes his smoking habit to the author.

The novelist Kevin Power is one who thought he'd quit for good, until he spotted Amis and Isabel Fonseca walking on the grounds of Ireland's prestigious Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas.

Peeling off from his friends, Power sidled up and asked Amis for a lighter. Amis obliged and handed Power a thumb-sized Bic, shortly after which Power became aware that the success of this move had emboldened his cohort to form a crowd around a once discreet scene.

The opportunity to speak to Amis one-on-one came again later that weekend, but as Kevin explains on the episode, he has always thought of Amis both as "a prose presence" and "a friend" to the reader, and as such, there is little more one can hope to gain from having met Amis than is permenantly there for them in his writing.

Amis is unique among novelists in this sense. Even when you listen to his interviews, what you often hear are lines Amis had committed to print somewhere for posterity. Everything he ever wanted to tell us, he told us.

This episode deals with Power's chosen novel, Time's Arrow, which was short-listed for the 1991 Booker Prize, and which Power says uses Amis's "full suite of talents" to portray the atrocities of Auschwitz in reverse, both to darkly comic and deeply moving effect. Frequently overlooked in favour of Amis's trifecta of thick London novels, the slender Time's Arrow is nonetheless one of Amis's most mysterious and morally complex achievements.

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For this episode of My Martin Amis, we're plugging into the London recording studio of the New Statesman magazine.

From the intro: "Founded by economists and social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1913, the New Statesman has enjoyed a long history of finding and fostering journalistic and literary talent.

In the early Seventies, the paper went through a succession of editors, during which time its circulation hit a low ebb. Among its staff then were two bright talents who became close friends through their employer.

They sported flared trousers, yellowed fingertips and hair of thickness and length relatively similar to my guests. Their names were Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.

Half a century later, minus the flares and barely disguised homoerotic tension (although who knows what we’ll learn on this episode), a new duo stalks the newsroom."

Jack's guests on this episode are George Monaghan, the New Statesman’s junior commissioning editor, and Nick Harris, its ideas editor. At 27, they are both in the prime of their youth, yet have chosen to speak about what Amis taught them in Experience on the eternally fertile subjects of love, life, and literature.

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David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his sixth novel Flesh in 2025. In this tense, spare, frictionless work of fiction, he drip feeds us the story of the laconic male protagonist Istvan, who spends his youth in a juvenile facility in Hungary before eventually finding his way into a fractured family situated among the upper echelons of London's wealthiest elites, where his fortunes soon unravel.

Flesh was celebrated as a return of the male gaze to modern literature, and to masculinity as a subject worthy of more sympathetic and complex consideration than the last decade arguably would suggest.

For this episode, David chose to speak to Jack about The Information, a titanic Amis work in which a literary rivalry between the main characters Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry ripples out to the peripheries of middle class London life and conscripts the city's criminal fringes to help settle the score.

David tells Jack why, especially after winning the Booker, he considers The Information literature's greatest tonic for writerly vanity. He recounts his discovery of Amis's work as a young man, and explains why Tull and Barry, though both excruciating to witness in their insecurities for the reader, are nevertheless relatable to writers who know the misery that ultimately binds them together.

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