I don’t know why I wanted a girl,’ he says, as if to himself. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t swap Louis, but when they said, ‘It’s a boy!’, I thought: ‘Oh, well.’ Everyone else was incredibly...

Martin is your best friend, isn’t he?’ a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed...

Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,’ as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time...

On page 605, Blumenthal says that ‘I made friends with Hitchens’s friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.’ True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited...

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they’re not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet...