Irresistible

More than enough imaginative colour to enliven even the dreariest day

A steamy, escapist romp

One of the most terrifying postulations about the end of the world.. One can only admire the strength and courage of this visionary

Brutal, addictive and extremely entertaining... strange, unsettling and harsh

Serious, evocative and surprising, unique in its obsessive images of encroachment

Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan...she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot.

Ice is superbly unsettling... this novel is perfect winter reading.

Just the most magnificent book...hugely enigmatic, a genuine novel of the unconscious and a masterpiece. I feel very passionate about it, as you can probably tell.

Typically glorious, typically enraging… You’re also reminded of his astuteness as a reader, and his instinctive grasp of what an author’s up to… Very few writers can surprise and delight in the way Martin Amis can. There may be pratfalls to come, there may be breaches of decorum, but that ear for the thought-rhythms will have to get a whole lot tinnier before I stop reading him.

There are some terrific essays here, especially those on the literary subjects most dear to him (Bellow and Nabokov booking the volume) and those to whom he was personally close, such as his father and Christopher Hitchens. A review of Nabokov’s barely sketched last novel, The Original of Laura, titled Nabokov and the Problem from Hell, grapples with greater honesty than any other critic has managed with Nabokov’s “nympholepsy” or, as it might be, sympathy with paedophilia.

Joyously self-deprecating… As in tennis, Martin Amis boasts a range of lightly executed master strokes, and sustains an entertaining game… Amis is as big a personality on the literary court as the players he lionises. The critical distinctions he draws between Vladimir Nabokov, the patrician émigré spinning “divine levity” out of his family’s flight from the Holocaust, and Saul Bellow, the loving immigrant with a visionary intellectual range and sentience, most often hit the mark.

Stunning… What a read.

This collection of essays, written over 30 years, is a joy to dip into as he brings his critical eye and linguistic dexterity to bear on literature and politics, sport and pornography.

Think of Milton’s… Darkly glittering Satan – vivid, passionate, partisan and fatally persuasive – and you have Martin Amis... The Rub of Time is written in the teeth of mortality. Here is Amis, often at his most brilliant, quick, passionate, very funny and up to his eyes in the mess of being human… For all their cleverness, these essays are characterized by their emotional engagement. Amis gathers his personal canon around him, as you might pull a cloak tight against the cold and coming dark… It’s Life that Amis is interested in. His plea, addressed to Time, is: give us just a little more Life, damn you.

Euphonious, penetrating and very funny. Amis on Larkin. Amis on porn. Amis on Amis. You’d better get it.

Martin Amis’s non-fiction stretches the mind and the vocabulary of his readers. He is acutely perceptive, and illuminates and reveals an author or a book. The Rub of Time…, his recent collection of pieces written between 1986 and 2016, is brilliant on politics, poker, people and place. Unmissable.

They are also little masterpieces in themselves - almost every sentence in my copy is in underlined. Amis is a good novelist but he's a brilliant essayist.

[Amis] knows how to make his words stick in your head. A real treat

Hugely satisfying. Sensitive and sorrowful, it is also fast paced, sassy, and very funny... Another fruitful pursuit from the worthwhile Hogarth enterprise.

A psychologically acute look at power, dispossession and the ravages of old age... Caustically funny and full of fury, this is a devastating look at a family meltdown

Darkly comic… The intertextual prompts are nimble, and Dunbar’s painful wanderings through the snow re-enact something of the heath… An ambitious “take” on Shakespeare’s greatest play

This study of a modern, materialistic society and blood relationships, at once witty and devastating, is the perfect reading over any family Christmas.

Gentle, soft-spoken, and full of wisdom

A delight to read

Prepare to have your heartstrings tugged by this quirky tale

A sprightly, digressive, intriguing fandango on life and time

These individuals converge to confront each other in the big shabby house, like characters in a Chekhov play. At first, hellish implosion looms. Slowly, erratically, connection creeps in. Lux quietly mediates. Ire softens. Sophia at last eats something. Art resees Nature..."Winter" gives the patient reader a colorful, witty - yes, warming - divertissement

With Iris and Lux as catalysts, scenes from Christmas past unfold, and our narrow views of Sophia and Art widen and deepen, filled with the secrets and substance of their histories, even as the characters themselves seem to expand. As in Sophia's case, for Art this enlargement is announced by a hallucination - "not a real thing," as Lux tells Iris, whose response speaks for the book's own expansive spirit: "Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing?"