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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In the basement room of an East London flat one rainy January morning, Jack sat down with the Irish writer Rob Doyle to discuss the publication of his third novel, Cameo, and delve into his long and complex love for the work of Martin Amis.

Rob chose to talk about London Fields, the novel we first encounter on this series through the Financial Times columnist, Janan Ganesh. But whereas Ganesh grew up in Croydon in the late Eighties, with the London Amis depicts in the novel practically on his doorstep, Doyle had never been to England's capital when the cover of London Fields first caught his eye, aged 23, from the shelves of a book exchange at a backpacker's hostel in South East Asia.

On a long bus journey in this far-flung part of the world, Doyle recounts coming to terms with the alchemic mastery of Amis's prose in this 1989 masterpiece. London Fields, he says, blended seamlessly the very highest ideas with the very lowest, all to great comic effect. Writing about London, Amis was engaged in an act of philosophy, dredged up from the deepest pits of urban and human decay.

Rob and Jack go on to discuss that force of nature that is of course Keith Talent. Talent is for Doyle, as he is for Ganesh, not just one of Amis's greatest characters, but one of the greatest characters ever to cast a shadow on the history of English literature. Of all Amis's beleaguered and benighted male creations, Talent is also arguably the happiest, since apart from anything else, he would be the least bothered by Amis's contempt for him.

Later on, Rob and Jack talk about the world Amis so often condemns his male characters to live in. Whether we look to John Self (a man consumed by his own oniomania), the bleak rivalry that sets Keith Talent and Guy Clinch on their fateful course with Nicola Six, or indeed that which Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry must see through a novel later in The Information, Amis's men are rarely sanguine creatures.

Male conflict and humiliation were two of Amis's greatest subjects, but while Doyle still regards Amis as one of the best writers ever to interrogate them in their art, he is less convinced by Amis's opposition outlook on male relationships now, in his forties, than he was as a younger man.

Happy New Year to you, dear listener. 2026 has begun.

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This episode takes Jack Aldane to Manchester, where he meets two men who knew Martin Amis in a rather unique setting. Ian McGuire and John McAuliffe, both esteemed authors, are the co-founders of The Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Not long after establishing this bastion of new literary talent in 2007, the pair began the search for ambassadors to endorse its mission and teach new entrants. In 2006-2007, Martin Amis joined as Iconic Professor of Creative Writing. He was followed in 2011-2012 by Colm Tóibín, who in turn was followed by Jeanette Winterson, who has filled the role since 2013. More recently, the centre has enjoyed the employment of Emma Clarke and Tim Price on its new screenwriting modules.

As its website explains, the centre teaches people "how to write novels, short stories, poems, plays and screenplays", helping students "to read as a writer reads, offer seminars on form and theory, and on contemporary publishing".

Ian and John recount their fondest, funniest memories of working alongside Amis, as well as the political climate after 9/11 that made him more of a political figure than he'd ever been before.

This conversation captures an altogether different look at who Amis was. This is Martin Amis not so much performing for an audience as seeking to impart the best of what he knew to a new generation of writers. This was, as John describes, an "avuncular" Amis, then in his 50s and early 60s, still game for a pint down the local with his students, and with arguably some of his best work still ahead.

And then there was Amis's surprising grasp of the 5 principles of Pilates. If you want understand what that's about, you know what to do.

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