Bradford shoots off in the opposite direction, giving us an image of author and novels so over-glossed you can smell the varnish. To a writer dogged by accusations of nepotism, celebrity-mongering, social alpinism, big advances, vanity teeth-fixing and the rest, surely this is a disservice to his hero? Inevitably critic after critic has underlined Bradford's partiality for his subject. To the old joke My Struggle, by Martin Amis, we can now add a critical counterpart: Mart: The Life.

Not that it's a bad book, and for someone like myself who was always more interested in the novels than the gossip there are revelations. A striking (and I hope not overwritten) chapter concerns his passage from self-styled teenage yob who had not troubled to read his father's books, let alone the classics, to shameless swot, who at 17 began toiling away at his Beowulf and his Keats and his Latin and got to Oxford on personal merit; with the sons of meritorious fathers, as one of the Miliband brothers reminds us, it was not always the case at the time. We are also given what I assume to be a true picture of the high social plateau inhabited by his women (boho aristos or equivalent, most of them frequently clever too) to set against the determinedly lowlife pastimes of the author in his twenties. 

Throughout his novels and critical writings the word "talent" recurs with obsessive frequency, to the point where for Amis, you sometimes feel, it marks the great human divide. (Back to Degas: Amis would have relished, one suspects, the old boy's magisterial admonition to the feckless Whistler: "You behave like a man with no talent.") Except for a single slobby mate of his youth his charmed circle consisted of more or less gifted folk (Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Clive James, etc), an exclusive and nakedly ambitious clique with fashionable attitudes to match, and where Trotskyism was an indulgence, like drink or women. 

   His own wariness of politics when all about him were conforming to type was and remains to Amis's credit. Think of the damage to his work if he had reacted against his father's stagy rightism and toed the arts-person's political line: imagine the glorious John Self reformed, at the end of Money, and with a leftist agenda. But then Amis had too much sense of humour for earnest causes.