Amis and his ilk
Literary London is enjoying an exhibition-quality row between the veteran Marxist bore and critic, Terry Eagleton, and the novelist, Martin Amis (pictured). Eagleton started it, says the Daily Telegraph:
In an introduction to the 2007 edition of his classic book, "Ideology: An Introduction", Prof Eagleton attacks the views of "Amis and his ilk" for taking up cudgels against Islam instead of propounding tolerance and understanding. The attack also extends to Amis's novelist father, the late Kingsley Amis. Prof Eagleton calls Kingsley Amis "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals". He adds: "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase".
Happily, the things Amis learned from his father included the conduct of shapely literary feuds (and, I trust, the correct use of the word "ilk"). Here he is, replying, in a letter to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
Eagleton ... is a man of a redundant but familiar type: an ideological relict, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx. More remarkably, he combines a cruising hostility with an almost neurotic indifference to truth; on the matter of checking his facts, he is, to be frank, an embarrassment to the academic profession. But his human need is simple enough: he wants attention to be paid to his self-righteousness – righteousness being his particular brand of vanity.
Both Amis and Eagleton have chairs at Manchester University: physical proximity surely increases the chance that some snippet of this might some day make YouTube. Is violence in the SCR very far away—or is this a professional wrestling-type grudge match, in which the spitting faces are put on for public performance?
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