In 2002 Martin Amis published Koba the Dread, a memoir-cum-history of Stalinism. The book closes with a letter to his father’s ghost, in which Amis tries to sum up the difference between his own work and that of Kingsley Amis: “You wrote... about the bourgeoisie in your fiction,” he says, “a category seldom seen in mine, where I make do with the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, the lumpenproletariat, and the urkas.”
You can read the rest of my review of Martin Amis's new novel House of Meetings, which appears (belatedly) in tomorrow's Financial Times, here.