Martin Amis: he stamped his style over a generation of writers and readers | Books | The Guardian

The Information was published when Amis was 45 years old: for almost half his life he was overwhelmingly interested in the end of life. In London Fields (1989), written in his 30s, he said that "Death gives us something to do. Because it's a full-time job looking the other way."

It was an odd preoccupation for a writer whose work, and whose success, was characterised by its liveliness and energy, its bright-eyed and pink-tongued vigour. Amis's supercharged prose style, all heft and twang, raced past his contemporaries and left them standing.

Amis was "the crown prince of literary hipness" according to the New York Times and "the good-looking bad guy of late 20th-century Eng Lit" (Melvyn Bragg) who, some felt, was marked for success from birth. As the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, he joked, it was "just like taking over the family pub".