Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

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.