British author, journalist and war correspondent David Patrikarakos was due to leave the UK for Athens in the summer of 2024. Before he left, he discovered My Martin Amis, and quickly got in touch to ask to tell his story about how he became, as he put it, "mildly obsessed" with the late novelist.

On this episode, David and Jack sit down together early one morning to revisit The Rachel Papers, Amis's first novel and one previously discussed on episode 4 with journalist and author Zoe Strimpel. David explains that he discovered the novel on his family bookshelf at the age of 14. The opening line from Charles Highway was a slam dunk: "simple and declarative and clever". From that point on, David was an Amis fan.

David also describes an antique copy of Hamlet he bought that once belonged to Amis as an undergraduate. The book contains Amis's marginalia. For more on that, you'll have to listen to the conversation. Needless to say, Amis was a precocious student who never stopped overachieving in later life, much to the chagrin of his global peers and critics.

David and Jack also discuss Amis's famous friendship with the late essayist Christopher Hitchens, with whom Amis shared much of his life, even the same cause of death. Were he to have the job of teaching a class of journalism students for a year, David says he would have no problem replacing Hitchens with Amis on the reading list. Amis's The War Against Cliche aside, being "alive to the possibilities of prose" is essential to any writer, he says. Yes, Amis can be over-prescriptive at times, but by letting him guide you for a period, you soon discover what it is writing does that no other art form can do.

The important thing, as ever, is to learn from Martin Amis, then go your own way.

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On this episode, British journalist, author and video game critic for The Observer Simon Parkin reaches into the more obscure corners of Amis's bibliography to dissect a dazzling collection of arcade game reviews published circa 1982. Entitled Invasion of the Space Invaders, this glossy publication starts with Amis's recollection of the moment these machines stole his heart, after a Space Invaders console makes its debut in a bar in the South of France.

It goes on to chart the best arcade games of the era, offering Amis's review of everything from Pac-Man to Donkey Kong, to Frogger, to Missile Command. We also get his firsthand observations from the scuffed floors of New York's seediest video parlours of who this new medium is attracting, why it is so captivating to its devotees, and what it is costing both them and society at large.

Simon explains how Amis first fuelled his aspirations to write as a freelance journalist, and why his work remains both aspirational and relatable to this day.

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John Niven is a Scottish author and screenwriter whose books include Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs, The Second Coming. The F*ck-it List, and O Brother.

John discusses his favourite of Amis's novel, The Information, published in 1995. The Information follows two star-crossed writers, Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull. The pair have been friends since university, but now as their approach their mid years, Tull's once promising career is withering on the vine while Barry receives plaudits and more opportunities than he can manage.

John explains how the novel has aged like fine wine for him, both as a reader and writer whose career has mirrored both Tull and Barry's circumstances, though he is pleased to say it has settled somewhere comfortably in the middle of the two.

As John says, Amis occupied a rarefied place: a serious literary novelist who was at the same time incredibly funny. His hunch is that Amis will be read for decades to come. Time is, after all, the only true test of a writer's work.

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