"I wish Amis's Substack was landing in my inbox today." George Monaghan and Nicholas Harris
My Martin AmisShow Notes
For this episode of My Martin Amis, we're plugging into the London recording studio of the New Statesman magazine.
From the intro: "Founded by economists and social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1913, the New Statesman has enjoyed a long history of finding and fostering journalistic and literary talent.
In the early Seventies, the paper went through a succession of editors, during which time its circulation hit a low ebb. Among its staff then were two bright talents who became close friends through their employer.
They sported flared trousers, yellowed fingertips and hair of thickness and length relatively similar to my guests. Their names were Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
Half a century later, minus the flares and barely disguised homoerotic tension (although who knows what we’ll learn on this episode), a new duo stalks the newsroom."
Jack's guests on this episode are George Monaghan, the New Statesman’s junior commissioning editor, and Nick Harris, its ideas editor. At 27, they are both in the prime of their youth, yet have chosen to speak about what Amis taught them in Experience on the eternally fertile subjects of love, life, and literature.
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More from My Martin Amis
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David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his sixth novel Flesh in 2025. In this tense, spare, frictionless work of fiction, he drip feeds us the story of the laconic male protagonist Istvan, who spends his youth in a juvenile facility in Hungary before eventually finding his way into a fractured family situated among the upper echelons of London's wealthiest elites, where his fortunes soon unravel.
In the basement room of an East London flat one rainy January morning, Jack sat down with the Irish writer Rob Doyle to discuss the publication of his third novel, Cameo, and delve into his long and complex love for the work of Martin Amis.
This episode takes Jack Aldane to Manchester, where he meets two men who knew Martin Amis in a rather unique setting. Ian McGuire and John McAuliffe, both esteemed authors, are the co-founders of The Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.