Experience (Martin Amis) very moved. What seems at first just gossip and guestlists - sprays of names offered without explanation, diaristic footnotes, a refusal to universalise - soon becomes a kind of tender defiance, as if Amis wanted the book to vibrate with an atmosphere of wounded privacy." Terence Baker, in "The Sunday Times", called it a "careful, heartfelt tribute." Jackie Wullschlager, wrote in the "Financial Times", "The core here is family, and it is movingly, beautifully, evoked... The raw materials – neurotic, outrageous genius of a father; gorgeous earth-mother Hilly; sophisticated step-mother Elizabeth Jane Howard; stunning girlfriends dropped along the way like
Amis language the language, and it is not known how many of the 138,000 ethnic Amis are speakers. Amis is a dialect cluster. There are five dialects, Southern Amis, Tavalong-Vataan, Central Amis, Chengkung-Kwangshan, and Northern Amis (Nanshi Amis, which includes Nataoran). Sakizaya is a moribund language spoken among the northernmost ethnic Ami but is mutually unintelligible with the Northern Amis dialect. The following discussion covers the central dialect of Amis (Maddieson & Wright). The voiceless plosives and the affricate are released in clusters, so that "cecay" "one" is pronounced ; as is : "sepat" "four" is . The glottal stop is an