"Amis's talent was to put words to things in ways both unobvious and inevitable." David Szalay

David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his sixth novel Flesh in 2025. In this tense, spare, frictionless work of fiction, he drip feeds us the story of the laconic male protagonist Istvan, who spends his youth in a juvenile facility in Hungary before eventually finding his way into a fractured family situated among the upper echelons of London's wealthiest elites, where his fortunes soon unravel.

Flesh was celebrated as a return of the male gaze to modern literature, and to masculinity as a subject worthy of more sympathetic and complex consideration than the last decade arguably would suggest.

For this episode, David chose to speak to Jack about The Information, a titanic Amis work in which a literary rivalry between the main characters Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry ripples out to the peripheries of middle class London life and conscripts the city's criminal fringes to help settle the score.

David tells Jack why, especially after winning the Booker, he considers The Information literature's greatest tonic for writerly vanity. He recounts his discovery of Amis's work as a young man, and explains why Tull and Barry, though both excruciating to witness in their insecurities for the reader, are nevertheless relatable to writers who know the misery that ultimately binds them together.

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