It’s heavily edited you slob

RIP Martin Amis.

Or Amis. You do know he, Clive and others had a regular literary lunch at the Bursa Kebab House, don’t you?

They really were Very close, d'you follow me?

They both died of esophageal cancer 😔

They had three beers before lunch each on a working day and leered at passing women.

Nabokov and Vidal imitations.

@Johnconno That's the sort of thing that a dumb person would say when trying to appear smart

@juliovillagran4105 Do you read the dictionary a lot?

I'd say Hitch was encyclopaedic himself.

I think Hitchens was more erudite than Amis. In his 'Inside story', Amis recounts with admiration how the Hitch gave him an impromptu lecture, on the origins of the first world war, starting his exposition with the battle of Kosovo in 1389. There's a wonderful essay by Hitch entitled 'Lightness at Midnight', were he implies that Amis's reading was deficient in the general area of Stalinist Communism, and even instances a couple of books. Also Hitch was superior in the way he summoned and marshalled facts, to deploy them effectively in an argument.

And Clive took apart Hitchens’ quaint insistence that all would have been fine had Lenin lived.

I read this differently. There's always got to room for flexibility and not being always right. which one was willing to grow and change and which one developed into a misguided opiniate who got some serious political matters horribly wrong 😅

They may be the last true resisters. But if the rumours are true that they were funded by Soros (as is often apparently the case), then they were set up as mere entertainment for the psychopathic elites, and ultimately as a lesson for the rest of us. This all began on the public stage when Kissinger met Mao in 1972. They’ve had us all sliding down the gift chute into China ever since. Peace, until THEY make the alternative inevitable

2001, I think

@hoop loopooiikk thanks man 🤝

They aren't

@@arthurriordan5760 they are, in Italy

It's upto you. I've always pronounced it like fell-eh-shio

There not brain dead OMG! hyperbolic Americans mate.

That is how interviews normally work, yes…

Does Clive mention Jayne Mansfield and lobsters at any point?

Had exactly this thought.

Caring about injustice, cruelty and hypocrisy? Never stopped us loving TS Eliot. But the cruelty, ignorance and bigotry does greatly diminish Larkin. It's an astonishing gap in his sometimes extraordinary imagination. Those who reduce it to tut-tutting miss the whole point of literature. He'll always be best known for the contradiction.

@@lizziebkennedy7505 It does not diminish him at all to some of us - so stop speaking from your prurient, tame little perch of sanctimonious conformity, woman.

@@lizziebkennedy7505 You would have to be fairly asinine to think the venting in Larkin’s letters affects the poems.

He took his father's opinion very much on board, maybe too much. That you don't mimic the pronunciation of other languages if you're speaking English.

@@ianparker9231 but in doing so, is entirely mispronouncing the word...thus making him look rather silly billy in the process.

Martin references this in his memoir Experience funnily enough. That his Father always used to pronounce words in a rather peculiar way that as kids they could never understand. One day they asked Kingsley and he talked about not relying on spelling pronunciation and instead speaking words according to their natural rhythms. He considered it the posh or upper-class way of speaking. Martin does his too, a great deal.

By that standard who is permitted to criticise a titan such as Joyce? Perhaps half a dozen are on his level and they're all dead.

@@QwidgyboManyeh that was a bizarre comment. By that logic there’d be no such thing as criticism

​@@QwidgyboManAnd many of them also viewed Joyce's 'masterpieces' unfavourably. Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley spring to mind first, even Nabokov another great stylist, but I would need to reconfirm his views as it's been awhile.

Yeah, I’ve always preferred your work too

Waiting for your collected works sometime soon.

Chill out Charles