Even worse is the consensus on Amis as a person. He's Keith Talent. He's a very bad guy. In Larkin's case, the vicious ad hominem attacks began after he died. In Amis's case, personal abuse already passes for legitimate literary criticism. Critics have accused Amis of racism, misogyny and egotism. He's vain (the teeth), and greedy (the £500,000 advance, the Manchester University salary). He's "ageist", a shameless self-promoter and "past HIS sell-by date" (the euthanasia drama). He sprouts "arrogant twaddle" (the children's writing melee). Professor Terry Eagleton famously shot a rocket at the House of Amis: "[Kingsley Amis was] a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals." Eagleton added that: "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase."

But the bores don't need to put up with him for much longer, because Martin Amis is moving to New York. Amis is leaving for his family. His wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, wants to live closer to her parents. Nonetheless, there was speculation in the papers recently that he's fed up with hostile reviews of his books and intrusive reporting about his life. Amis's editor at Jonathan Cape, Dan Franklin, told The Sunday Times in September that: "Martin plans to go to live in New York mainly because of Isabel, but I would also not blame him for leaving because of the way the media treats him and looks at the minutiae of his personal life. In America he would not, and does not, get that close personal scrutiny." The bores are claiming a victory in hounding "Wounded Amis" out of London.

They're also booing Amis because he's trash-talking England. As I write, he's reportedly called the royal family "philistines" in an interview with a French magazine. Last month he said that he's embarrassed the English "don't see that England doesn't matter in the world". England is "an old drunk with airs of grandeur". It's the "land of Shakespeare", where everybody "wants to know about Jordan". Katie Price was once described by Amis as "two bags of silicone", and he's recommended readers think of her when they meet a character called Threnody in his next novel. The novel, tentatively due for publication next February, was initially titled State of England. A.N. Wilson, who sang in the cowardly choir that abused Larkin after the poet's death — he called him a "kind of petty-bourgeois fascist" and "nutcase" — responded to all this good news in the Daily Mail on Monday:

The reality is that the former enfant terrible of English novelists has turned into a strange, purple-faced parody of his father — only without the back catalogue of great books that Kingsley so impressively notched up. [...] Increasingly, his public utterances are more and more bizarre. He announced he will soon be leaving Britain to live in the US, and maybe that is just as well. Most of us have had enough of him — his mean-minded denunciations of the poor old Queen and her grandson's wedding being the final straw.

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