Marttin and the art of having a literary opinion

Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers and the lost pleasure of writers telling us exactly what they think

I've just reread The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis's first novel, and somewhere in the middle of enjoying it, being irritated by it and occasionally wondering how on earth a 23-year-old got away with some of it, I found myself thinking about criticism. Not criticism of Amis, but Amis as critic.

That might seem an odd response to The Rachel Papers, a novel published in 1973 about Charles Highway, an extraordinarily self-absorbed, arrogant character pursuing a place at Oxford and Rachel Noyes with the sort of strategic planning normally associated with a minor military campaign. 

Can you trust Truman Capote? In Cold Blood, true crime and what happens when murder becomes literature

A little while ago, I asked a question that probably isn't advisable for somebody who spends quite a lot of time writing about other people.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.