There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood...Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.

Dead Babies (1975) more flippant in tone chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in a country house to take drugs. " He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States. Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) about a young woman coming out of a coma was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry.

that constant demonstrating of his command of English" and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop". He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.