I've been all around. I've done the work. I've done the hustle. And I've always found my way back to the field of tussle. Welcome to Michael and us. I'm Will Sloan, here as always with.

Luke Savage, welcome back, folks. Well, just off the top, I got an article to share with you that I think was probably my favorite thing I read the past week.

It was by the Marxist critic and literary theorist Terry Eagleton. I don't know if you have any

relationship to the novelist Martin Amos, but he passed away recently. I have some relationship,

not so much with his novels, but his literary nonfiction I've read a fair amount of.

I have probably the same take that you would have, which is that a heavyweight intellectual in many ways, a wonderful writer, terrific prose, quite a good literary critic.

Politically could have been better, you know, on certain things.

The reason I bring this up is because I think Eagleton's piece, which is called

The Liberal Complacency of Martin Amos, this is published in unheard.

I think it really articulates very well the political limitations of someone like Martin Amos,

while also, you know, acknowledging fully his real gifts as a stylist.

And, you know, Eagleton actually ends the article where

most of it is very, he's very critical. But at the end, he just says he was a fabulously gifted

writer and though I never met him, he wouldn't share a TV studio with me. His relatively early

death is a sore loss to the Republic of Letters. So that's how he ends it. But most of the

essay is concerned with kind of the

limitations of Amos' politics. And I bring it up partly just because I think it's interesting,

but also because, you know, it's not just about Amos. It's also about the sort of literary milieu

that produced him. And I think Eagleton says something very interesting about it, which you'll see

immediately why it attracted me.

But Amos writes, Amos his own clique, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwen, Christopher Hitchens,

James Fenton, Clive James, were a formidable talented bunch of wits and whiz kids, almost all of them

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