Leo Robson is a freelance writer whose work has featured in The New Yorker, Harpers and New Statesman, among others.
In this episode, he and the series' host and producer Jack Aldane sit down to discuss Martin Amis's fourth novel Other People, a Mystery Story, published in 1981.
Robson explains that Amis had many literary debts his fans can take pleasure in exploring, and that the novelist, much like his father Kingsley, wrote in order to manage his fears and anxieties about the turbulence of the 20th century.
The taxonomies Amis used to organise the world, from the largest elemental forms (Time, Death, Sex, Money), to the minutiae of existence, were arguably his coping strategy, Robson says, and one he wielded brilliantly.
Though his "centurion confidence" as a writer could grate, he adds, Amis gifted his readers a way to see the world afresh, to take it in slowly and carefully, and to use some of that same confidence to marvel and laugh at its darkest features.
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"Amis is at his best when he leans into his fears." Leo Robson