So there is real meat here, but everywhere the veneration intrudes. Throughout the book the swell of eulogy grows into a wave that breaks in the last chapter, in which Bradford drowns in his own hyperbole. Yes, Amis is superior to Barnes and McEwan (is that saying so much?), but superior to Nabokov, as he at one point claims? Wonderful as it is, is Money up there with James Joyce and Ulysses? And is the (admittedly over-derided) Yellow Dog in fact a "brilliantly orchestrated" masterpiece? 

Bradford's book is an opportunity lost. Here we have that rare thing, a modern British author able at his best to match up to some of the American giants, but his biographer spoils it by cosy excess, unable it seems to contemplate the possibility that his subject is not always at the top of his form. The result is another example of the wearisome boosterism that has come to characterise so much of British culture. With a PR smoothichops leading the country and a circus barker as Mayor of London, must we go in for unseemly puffery in the arts as well? More selective praise would have helped cut the ground from under Amis's purblind or rancorous detractors. 

The best critical passages are a reminder of the man's quality, so much greater than his father's, and of the seriousness beneath the humour. In this regard, more could have been said about Amis's The War Against Cliché and his prowess as a critic. Recently reviewing Public Enemies, the exchange of letters between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq, I found myself casting around for a pair of British essayists who could pull off a similar performance: only an Amis/Hitchens correspondence occurred to me. And on the subject of what Amis might have written, the great mystery is why he has never taken on the pop industry. Don DeLillo had a go in Great Jones Street, with his Bucky Wunderlick character, and Salman Rushdie with his rather cloying The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but with his lack of deference to the rock world and feeling for gargantuan pretence, Amis would be the natural man to do it.

In a literary market that has become toppy and frothy, as the City boys say when shares soar above their underpinnings, and in need of a correction, how does the Amis oeuvre look when set against his frequently bloated rivals? Let's take the simplest measure. People will be reading this work in 50 years' time, it is routinely and dubiously maintained of many an ephemeral Booker laureate. With the best of Amis junior, the prize's most distinguished non-recipient, they really will.