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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On Sunday 23 March 2025, listeners of the podcast gathered in Central London to watch a live Amisathon, featuring 8 panellists and the show's host.

The panel included former guests as well as a couple of new faces: Leo Robson, Alys Denby, Finn McRedmond, James Marriott, Zoe Strimpel, Sam Leith, Vincenzo Barney and John Niven.

It was a great success. Thank you to the 90+ ticket-holders who attended, to our wonderful panel, and to the stage team at 21Soho.

Relive the event or listen for the first time in this episode, ripped straight from the boards of the stage at the venue.

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Martin Amis's 1997 novel Night Train followed a trifecta of bestsellers: Money, London Fields and The Information.

Written as a dark parody of the noir genre, Night Train follows female detective Mike Hoolihan on an investigation into the suicide of a woman named Jennifer Rockwell. Her death is near total mystery to everyone who knew her, including Hoolihan. Prior to her death, Rockwell appeared to live a perfect life accentuated by her own physical beauty. Stranger still is the suggestion, based on the forensics, that Rockwell had shot herself in the head three times.

Night Train was adapted to screen in 2018 by film director, screenwriter and producer Carol Morley. In this episode, Morley speaks to Jack about how the opportunity came to her, her first impressions of the novel, and how in the process of adapting it she found a deep connection with both Hoolihan and Amis. The adaptation was named Out of Blue, a though it received mixed reviews, Amis emailed Carol to say he was pleased it had been made.

Carol speaks candidly about the process of collating the images around which to build the story, her research into American police investigations into homicide, and her last thoughts about the mark Amis left on her as a reader and film director.

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English novelist Anthony Quinn has met and interviewed Martin Amis on several occasions. Their first encounter followed the publication of London Fields in 1989, the second during the publicity storm that came with Amis's 1995 novel The Information.

In this episode, he and Jack discuss Amis's last novel, Inside Story, published in 2020. Although Anthony struggled with it in his first reading, he later came to consider it a masterful valedictory that encompasses all the best and worst of Amis as a man, and as a writer.

Described by some as 'The Big Book of Mart', Inside Story is part memoir, part novel, and part writing manual.

As well as revising Amis's final words of wisdom and warning to writers, Anthony and Jack cover the great romantic and literary loves of Amis's life, from Saul Bellow and his godfather Phillip Larkin, to the inimitable Christopher Hitchens. Crucially, Anthony reveals who he believes Amis loved most of all the people in his life.

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British author, journalist and war correspondent David Patrikarakos was due to leave the UK for Athens in the summer of 2024. Before he left, he discovered My Martin Amis, and quickly got in touch to ask to tell his story about how he became, as he put it, "mildly obsessed" with the late novelist.

On this episode, David and Jack sit down together early one morning to revisit The Rachel Papers, Amis's first novel and one previously discussed on episode 4 with journalist and author Zoe Strimpel. David explains that he discovered the novel on his family bookshelf at the age of 14. The opening line from Charles Highway was a slam dunk: "simple and declarative and clever". From that point on, David was an Amis fan.

David also describes an antique copy of Hamlet he bought that once belonged to Amis as an undergraduate. The book contains Amis's marginalia. For more on that, you'll have to listen to the conversation. Needless to say, Amis was a precocious student who never stopped overachieving in later life, much to the chagrin of his global peers and critics.

David and Jack also discuss Amis's famous friendship with the late essayist Christopher Hitchens, with whom Amis shared much of his life, even the same cause of death. Were he to have the job of teaching a class of journalism students for a year, David says he would have no problem replacing Hitchens with Amis on the reading list. Amis's The War Against Cliche aside, being "alive to the possibilities of prose" is essential to any writer, he says. Yes, Amis can be over-prescriptive at times, but by letting him guide you for a period, you soon discover what it is writing does that no other art form can do.

The important thing, as ever, is to learn from Martin Amis, then go your own way.

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On this episode, British journalist, author and video game critic for The Observer Simon Parkin reaches into the more obscure corners of Amis's bibliography to dissect a dazzling collection of arcade game reviews published circa 1982. Entitled Invasion of the Space Invaders, this glossy publication starts with Amis's recollection of the moment these machines stole his heart, after a Space Invaders console makes its debut in a bar in the South of France.

It goes on to chart the best arcade games of the era, offering Amis's review of everything from Pac-Man to Donkey Kong, to Frogger, to Missile Command. We also get his firsthand observations from the scuffed floors of New York's seediest video parlours of who this new medium is attracting, why it is so captivating to its devotees, and what it is costing both them and society at large.

Simon explains how Amis first fuelled his aspirations to write as a freelance journalist, and why his work remains both aspirational and relatable to this day.

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John Niven is a Scottish author and screenwriter whose books include Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs, The Second Coming. The F*ck-it List, and O Brother.

John discusses his favourite of Amis's novel, The Information, published in 1995. The Information follows two star-crossed writers, Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull. The pair have been friends since university, but now as their approach their mid years, Tull's once promising career is withering on the vine while Barry receives plaudits and more opportunities than he can manage.

John explains how the novel has aged like fine wine for him, both as a reader and writer whose career has mirrored both Tull and Barry's circumstances, though he is pleased to say it has settled somewhere comfortably in the middle of the two.

As John says, Amis occupied a rarefied place: a serious literary novelist who was at the same time incredibly funny. His hunch is that Amis will be read for decades to come. Time is, after all, the only true test of a writer's work.

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Reporter for The Sunday Times Will Lloyd sits down with Jack Aldane on this ninth episode to discuss The Second Plane, a collection of twelve pieces of nonfiction and two short stories by Amis published in 2008, covering 9/11, the age of terrorism, Islamism and the follies of the Blair-Bush coalition.

Will says Amis should be remembered as one of the greatest comic novelists ever to write in English. However, he adds that had the author remembered this himself when it counted, The Second Plane would probably never have been written.

The Second Plane shows what can happen to a writer when seismic events combine with the weight of expectation to explain them in real time. When the World Trade Center is attacked on 11 September 2001, Amis does not report from the ground, nor speak to those who witness the event firsthand. Instead, he along with other members of the literary elite are conscripted to tell the Anglophone world what it all means.

Some confess in their columns to being poleaxed by what they’ve seen. Amis instead uses his adrenaline to tame and name the collective moment with signature bombast. But this is not John Self’s New York, and Amis is unusually way off the mark.

Will explains why The Second Plane is arguably a literary parallel of the Iraq War. For one thing, the same errors of conjecture and righteous zeal are noticeable throughout.

Like so many cultural and political thought leaders of his time, Amis went over the top only to discover that he was woefully out of his depth.

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