THERE’S SOMETHING about Martin Amis the novelist; too smart, too glib, too damn clever. But this paperback collection of his essays and reviews over a 30-year period is neither too smart nor too glib, just damn clever. 

He clings to the idealistic view that all writing is a campaign against clichÊ and his Lit Crit battle trail takes him from Elvis to Jane Austen, Warhol to Wodehouse, as well as Larkin, Lowry . . . almost anyone who has raised a pen or flaunted an ego. 

I would expect him to be contemptuous of P. G. Wodehouse, instead he is rather affectionate: “Right to the end, that green world of his never began to lose its vernal brilliance.” Elvis Presley he dismisses as: “It is hard to imagine a character of more supercharged banality.” 

He is ambivalent about Iris Murdoch. Were she to slow down her output, he laments, “she would begin to find out how good she is”. And so it goes, sharp, witty, perceptive. Malcolm Lowry: “You wonder how he ever wrote anything — how he ever signed a cheque or left a note for the milkman.” 

James Joyce: “He makes Beckett look pedestrian, Lawrence look laconic, Nabokov look guileless.” 

And Nabokov? Amis’s copy of Lolita is filled with notes, which he explains as “gasps of continually renewed surprise. I am running out of clean white space.” Though not, one suspects, out of words. Richard Holledge