Why I never used to like him- the pretentious way he stretches the language, such as this, which he just said on the radio about his dad:

“I just remember the texture of his company… the basic colour of his mood was bad for about the last ten years of his life.”

Company doesn’t have texture. Wall-paint has texture. (Colour I would have given him, had he not put it so close to texture). Having said that, I thought Mr Amis seemed quite a nice, sensible person and suspected that his books might be quite transportingly dense, so I ordered the very famous Time’s Arrow.

New in the post today way London, the biography, by Peter Ackroyd. It is huge. However there is something very reassuring about huge tomes even if you don’t actually get around to reading them.