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
B. D. Amis which made a profoundly interested him as one of the few non-black organizations in the 1920s willing to seriously struggle against racism, and Amis would soon be working with William Z. Foster, the party leader and presidential candidate, whom Amis would help renominate together with the African American vice president nominee James W. Ford in 1932. Amis began contributing to Party journals not long afterward. The 1930 "Lynch Justice" attacked the Communist Party's leftist opposition, the less radical Socialist Party, which, although progressive in relation to the idea of African American equality in the northern states, had decided to abstain