You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.

Dead Babies (1975) more flippant in tone chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in a country house to take drugs. " He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States. Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) about a young woman coming out of a coma was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry.

that constant demonstrating of his command of English" and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop". He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.