Martin Amis was the only contemporary novelist that my late friend Stanley Middleton kept up with. I tuned in with ‘Other People’ and greatly enjoyed ‘Money’, went off him with ‘London Fields’ but really liked ‘The Information’. I didn’t get on with ‘Night Train’ or ‘Time’s Arrow’ (a gimmick that worked when I first read it as a short story but didn’t at novella length). I decided to give up on him after the execrable ‘Yellow Dog’ but Stan persuaded me to read ‘House of Meetings’ and it was really good. I avoided ‘Lionel Asbo’ as, regardless of his much imitated yet unique high style, it looked dreadful. Much of the non-fiction, of course, is terrific, though the auto-fiction in his final ‘novel’, Inside Story,…

Jenny Luithlen, who was my agent for more than thirty years, died the Sunday before last, aged 80, after a long illness. She specialised in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction, with a warm but insightful eye, taking no nonsense from publishers or her authors, most of whom viewed her with affectionate respect. Born in Ipswich, where her father was stationed during the war, Jenny worked for the publishers Hodder and Stoughton for 22 years before forming The Luithlen Agency in 1986. Her clients including the pony-story writing sisters Josephine and Christine Pullein-Thompson, taboo-breaking YA novelist Robert Swindells, Pete Johnson and Alison Prince. Jenny and Lutz’s daughter, Penny, joined the agency after graduating, soon bringing on board her former school-mate, prize winning author Bali Rai, and…

Another Post review that I haven’t got round to putting up here before, maybe because the gig was… underwhelming. I first saw Roger McGuinn playing with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan back in 1987, when I’d already been a huge fan for half my life. Saw him again in Sheffield, then Newark, doing versions of the show reviewed below. This was his last UK tour. Nine years on, now aged eighty, McGuinn is still touring the same show, in stark contrast to Bob Dylan, 81, whose shows have changed enormously in the fourteen times I’ve seen him since 1978. Still, like Donovan in the previous review, Roger’s more than earned the right to earn a crust in whatever way he wants. His…

Here’s another Post review I never got round to posting on the blog, probably because I was meant to be at this gig with my oldest and dearest friend, Mike Russell, who was in hospital that night and died a few days later. Anyway, a Greil Marcus piece about ‘Season of the Witch’ (which he played that night, not that I mention it) reminded me of going to this show. This review manages to avoid saying how irritating I found Donovan’s personality, though that may come through between the lines. I was surprised by how good the show was. The photo above is from the Smothers Brothers show in 1969. Here’s hoping that we’ll be hearing ‘Season of the Witch’ again as the theme song…

I was sad to spot on Instagram yesterday that Ambit magazine is closing down. Its final issue, number 249, is launched tonight. 250 would have made for a round number, but Ambit was never the sort of journal to be interested in neatness. I can’t make it to London, so offer this brief tribute instead. Ambit is nearly as old as me, first published in 1959 with a heyday that coincided with the swinging sixties and went on long beyond it. Founded by Dr Martin Bax, it was closely associated with the artist Ralph Steadman, who drew for it frequently, Bax’s close friend, the great SF writer J.G. Ballard, poet Adrian Mitchell and artist Michael Foreman. It always combined cutting edge literature with art and…