Martin Amis

I noticed Arma Virumque mention an interview which looks worth reading. They pull a quote which reminds me of the reaction of some to "Gran Torino":

I think people are too fragile now. Humour is . . . you don’t see much of it. You see it a lot on the sort of V C sub-surface, stand-up and TV and that. But the comic novel has more or less disappeared . . . Think of the range of what you can’t joke about now. It’s almost everything. I’m writing [in the new novel, The Pregnant Widow] about 1970, and I thought, well, I’ve got to be honest and put in the sort of jokes that people told. And I realised that it would just make everyone hate these characters so much—their jokes about Jews, about black people. It was actually a satire on prejudice and it was funny. But now the only political constituency of people you can sneer at are white South Africans, or white southerners in America, and up to a point, Israel. And Israel’s the unusual one, because they have slightly darker skin. But our whole kind of paralysis about Islam is to do with that.

His friend Ian Mcewan has been noted before. Also his friend Christopher Hitchens.

There may be other posts related, but I never labeled them. Thus the term "Mess" in the banner.