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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Reporter for The Sunday Times Will Lloyd sits down with Jack Aldane on this ninth episode to discuss The Second Plane, a collection of twelve pieces of nonfiction and two short stories by Amis published in 2008, covering 9/11, the age of terrorism, Islamism and the follies of the Blair-Bush coalition.

Will says Amis should be remembered as one of the greatest comic novelists ever to write in English. However, he adds that had the author remembered this himself when it counted, The Second Plane would probably never have been written.

The Second Plane shows what can happen to a writer when seismic events combine with the weight of expectation to explain them in real time. When the World Trade Center is attacked on 11 September 2001, Amis does not report from the ground, nor speak to those who witness the event firsthand. Instead, he along with other members of the literary elite are conscripted to tell the Anglophone world what it all means.

Some confess in their columns to being poleaxed by what they’ve seen. Amis instead uses his adrenaline to tame and name the collective moment with signature bombast. But this is not John Self’s New York, and Amis is unusually way off the mark.

Will explains why The Second Plane is arguably a literary parallel of the Iraq War. For one thing, the same errors of conjecture and righteous zeal are noticeable throughout.

Like so many cultural and political thought leaders of his time, Amis went over the top only to discover that he was woefully out of his depth.

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Journalist and memoirist Graham Caveney speaks to Jack Aldane on this eighth episode of the series about Martin Amis's iconoclastic fifth novel Money: A Suicide Note.

He and the host discuss the novel's true subject, which runs counter to popular interpretation. Though Money is often celebrated as the quintessential novel of the 80s, Caveney argues it is as much if not predominantly a story about the 60s, of which the 80s was arguably the last, lurid hurrah.

And of course, they discuss the novel’s protagonist John Self, who shows what happens when yobbish machismo meets a culture of convenience and excess, and whose farcical downfall makes Money an early diagnosis of the human condition under neoliberalism.

Caveney explains the novel's impact on his generation. By the closing decades of the 20th century, he says, aspirant writers in the UK were resigned to thinking about the English novel as a relic of the pre-war era. With the American canon at the helm, Britain was losing its voice in contemporary fiction. By writing Money Amis single-handed tore up the rulebook, proving that it was once more possible for English writers to take on the zeitgeist with originality and authority. For Caveney, Money was a cultural watershed on par with the greatest seminal moments in modern music.

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