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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week, we're gathering to contemplate Martin Amos, who died last week, just a Saturday evening the news broke.

And I'm very pleased to be joined by the critic and writer Alex Clark, by the novelist John Niven, and by our own Philip Henscher, to talk about it.

Now, Amos said something to the effect that it's when the obituaries are written that

the starting gun is fired on a writer's reputation.

So I want to start by asking you, well, you know, where are we now with Amos's reputation?

Where does that starting gun set us off from?

I think of late it's been, especially as a novelist, it's been fairly low.

There's a view that's become prevalent that, oh, it's really about his non-fiction, his criticism,

some of which is fabulous.

But I think he'd have been modified to not have been considered primarily a novelist.

I think that's how he saw himself.

And I think it's going to take a little while

for him to get his due desserts for the novels.

Certainly for the later novels,

which again, this prevalent view I've not much time for

is that everything kind of after the information was not very good, which is just a garbage view.

...