08/11/19: John O’Farrell – Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter 1979–1997 (1998)

“Only in Britain are people criticised for attempting to make something ‘a political issue’, when surely everything is a political issue.”

Witty and self-deprecating account of supporting the Labour party when they were at their lowest ebb. It certainly resonates with recent events, as Labour once again appear to have hit rock bottom.

O’Farrell worked as a researcher for an MP and as a press officer for a councillor. Later he wrote satirical and topical jokes and sketches for Spitting Image and Clive Anderson. It’s a genuinely funny memoir.

“I am just someone who feels very strongly that people should take part in every election: European elections, council by-elections – part of me even feels compelled to take part in the Stars in Their Eyes phone vote just because I have a right to do so.”

You feel his pain and he suffers endless Labour defeats and set-backs. The book ends on a note of total euphoria with the Labour landslide of 1st May 1997 and the beginning of the Tony Blair era. With hindsight that wouldn’t be quite the golden era it promised, but the author didn’t know that yet...

07/05/18: Martin Amis – The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces, 1986–2016 (2017)

I’m a big fan of Martin Amis and his collections of essays have always been as entertaining as his novels.

This book is organised around loose themes such as literature, politics, sport and more personal preoccupations. Most of these pieces are compelling even when you don’t care much for the subject – Princess Diana, the porn film industry and losing at poker in Las Vegas.

He can be very funny in places: “I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain)”.

He absolutely savages Jeremy Corbyn, calling him “undereducated” and “humourless”, with “no grasp of the national character”. And he’s extremely astute about Donald Trump in a piece written in May 2016: “Telling it like it is? Yes, but telling what like what is? Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, Trump is telling us that he, like every other honest Republican, is a xenophobe, and proud of it. That is worth knowing. And what he is additionally telling us is that roughly 50 per cent of Americans hanker for a political contender who a) knows nothing at all about politics, and b) won’t need to learn – because the old ‘politics’ will be rendered defunct on his first day in office.”

Some of the other political essays were less riveting, and occasionally certain pieces don’t quite deliver. A review of a Philip Roth biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont, for example, simply consists of Martin’s own thoughts on Philip Roth’s career. Almost nothing is said about the book he’s meant to be reviewing.

I was disappointed to find some errors, too. The inside jacket states that “Martin Amis is the author of 10 novels”, then the list of his fiction offers 16 titles – of which 14 are novels. Similarly, it’s a shame to see Don DeLillo’s name spelt as “De Lillo” on page 234 when it was written correctly on pages 177–185. Given how much Martin values and writes about precision in language, he should at least have had a decent proof-reader go through this.

One of the most enjoyable offerings is an affectionate portrait of his friend Christopher Hitchens from 2010, written after he became ill but before his death (December 2011). “The Hitch”, Amis claims, thinks “like a child”, writes “like a distinguished author” and speaks “like a genius”.

Best of all are his illuminating articles on literature. Amis really gets to grips with J.G. Ballard, Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, and brings sparkling insight to their work.