I've been on the ground, I've done the work, I've done the hustle, and I've always found my way back to the field of tests so weird.

Welcome to Michael and I, so I'm well slow, and here's always worth.

Luke Savage, welcome back folks.

Well, just off the top, I got an article to share with you.

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, is published in Unheard.

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

Well also, you know, acknowledging fully his real gifts as a stylist, and Eagleton actually ends the article where most of it is 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 Ladders.

So that's how he ends it.

But most of the essay is concerned with kind of the limitations of Amos's 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's own clique, Salman Rischthi, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwen, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Clive James,

were a formidable talented bunch of wits and whizz kids, almost all of them products of Oxbridge in an era of intense cultural creativity, the 60s and 70s.

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