A major reason to enjoy his work is his Gogolian aspect. As in Dead Souls or The Government Inspector, the objects of his satire are not so much sociopolitical entities as grotesque specimens of true humanity (think of the wastrel Khlestakov in The Government Inspector as Keith Talent, or the bully and cheat Nozdryov in Dead Souls as John Self). More democratic than the average British satirist, Amis looks down as well as up for his material, and could never have written a book as silly as Ian McEwan's Booker-winning Amsterdam, where a British Foreign Secretary is lampooned as a cross-dresser. 

You could of course argue that domestic politics were too pettifogging and insular for his not too modest ambitions. When he finally engages with political events it is later in his career, and on a global scale: Stalin and his Western admirers in Koba the Dread, the Holocaust in Time's Arrow, and Islamism in The Second Plane. And of course he has outraged the prejudices of his peers; hence in part the increased critical pasting of his fiction. 

His only concession to bien pensant fashion was an impetuous commitment to nuclear disarmament, perhaps as a counter to those who said he was lacking in beliefs of any kind. But then what do "commitment" or "anti-nuclear" mean? I do not recall too many bomb-lovers from my time as a diplomat dealing with Soviet and Chinese affairs, in need of an epiphany about the awfulness of these weapons. It is not as if Amis engaged in an informed critique of arms reduction strategies, and suggestions of a better way. Nothing so solid, or so tedious. 

It would be wrong to be too hard on this book. When linking the novels to the life, Bradford has his moments. A frighteningly talented, hard-nosed girlfriend, Mary Furness, was the model it seems for Nicola Six in London Fields, whose ball-breaking image scandalised two female Booker judges in 1989. The real scandal of course was the pusillanimous failure of the chairman, David Lodge, to come off the fence and ensure that this superb novel won. Instead it was Ishiguru's deathly Remains of the Day, a kind of no-garden of a novel, but then the English can never resist a butler.