This episode takes Jack Aldane to Manchester, where he meets two men who knew Martin Amis in a rather unique setting. Ian McGuire and John McAuliffe, both esteemed authors, are the co-founders of The Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Not long after establishing this bastion of new literary talent in 2007, the pair began the search for ambassadors to endorse its mission and teach new entrants. In 2006-2007, Martin Amis joined as Iconic Professor of Creative Writing. He was followed in 2011-2012 by Colm Tóibín, who in turn was followed by Jeanette Winterson, who has filled the role since 2013. More recently, the centre has enjoyed the employment of Emma Clarke and Tim Price on its new screenwriting modules.

As its website explains, the centre teaches people "how to write novels, short stories, poems, plays and screenplays", helping students "to read as a writer reads, offer seminars on form and theory, and on contemporary publishing".

Ian and John recount their fondest, funniest memories of working alongside Amis, as well as the political climate after 9/11 that made him more of a political figure than he'd ever been before.

This conversation captures an altogether different look at who Amis was. This is Martin Amis not so much performing for an audience as seeking to impart the best of what he knew to a new generation of writers. This was, as John describes, an "avuncular" Amis, then in his 50s and early 60s, still game for a pint down the local with his students, and with arguably some of his best work still ahead.

And then there was Amis's surprising grasp of the 5 principles of Pilates. If you want understand what that's about, you know what to do.

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In this episode, Jack sits down with the award-winning author and novelist Geoff Dyer at his home to discuss the Good Book of Mart (as distinct from the Big Book of Mart), AKA The War Against Cliché.

Geoff recalls his first encounter with Amis’s fiction, which he read consecutively as a young man, starting with The Rachel Papers in the late 70s and throughout the early 80s, until he was completely blown away by Money in 1984.

Geoff says The War Against Cliché is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him as a writer, not least because the essays contained within make the reader acutely aware of how much fun Amis had with his craft. Amis makes writing seem like the best job in the world, which explains why so many journalists treat The War Against Cliché as a talisman.

As well as the essays that stand out most within this collection, Jack and Geoff imagine what chance Geoff would have stood against Amis on the tennis court, why Geoff was right bring a bag of Amis’s books to a dinner party for signing, what the Amisian ‘aura’ was really all about, and how the publication of Geoff’s new memoir, Homework, gives him pause to reflect on Amis’s achievements with both Experience and Inside Story.

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Ross Barkan is a 35 year-old American journalist and novelist from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His third novel, Glass Century, was published on 6 May 2025.

On a semi-vacation to London this summer, Ross and Jack met to speak about Ross's favourite Martin Amis novel, Inside Story.

This the first episode of the series to deal explicitly, and at length, with Donald Trump.

Looking beyond the playful concept of 'The Maggot Probability' (first coined by Kingsley Amis to explain the degenerative effects of an ageing brain), Ross and Jack discuss Amis's graver concerns about true impact of America's septuagenarian president on its politics and political culture.

As a New Yorker, Ross recognises what he calls Trump's "outer-borough mindset", an attitude of adversity towards the elites of Manhattan who famously paid Trump little serious attention before his meteoric rise to office in 2016 forced them to.

That mindset, he argues, became Trump's calling card to the left behind of America, for whom Washington had come to represent the same den of iniquity and aloofness that the gleaming towers of The Big Apple had to Trump in the 70s and 80s.

And yet, while Amis does not take Trump lightly, Ross says his criticisms of Trump lack the corrosive power of the pen that Amis was otherwise known for. Amis confesses to taking an arch tone on the subject in Inside Story, though says he does so only because Trump is a "sick joke".

It's suggested later in the conversation that while Amis excelled at diagnosing modern pathologies in characters like John Self, he may have bottled it when it came to confronting the real thing in Trump. Does it take a true New Yorker to satirise this century's most controversial Western leader? It may help to read Ross's new novel before answering.

Finally, listen to this episode to discover what Ross took as indispensable writing advice from Amis in Inside Story.

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