Martin Amis 1949-2023: How The Spectator covered his life

Martin Amis died in Florida on Friday, of oesophageal cancer at the age of 73. Some of The Spectator’s best writers praised, reviled, laughed at and scorned Amis throughout his career. Here’s some extracts from our archive:

The Rachel Papers

‘The narrative is often very funny indeed, but I suspect that Martin Amis is getting the last laugh. Charles Highway is so much the archetypal youth, of a certain time and a certain class, that he is necessarily a comic creation. Sex is nowadays the vox populi, and almost vox dei if certain clergymen have anything to do with it, but for Highway it is a road paved with bad intentions. Although his descriptions are lurid and mechanical to the point of nausea, he has all the fascination and prurience of a naughty little boy who has been caught doing something nasty. There is, in fact, a little boy struggling to get out of Highway’s gawky frame – no more so than in the remarkable passages of adolescent angst and nostalgia.