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
Martin Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment." Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating that: Prominent British Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, wrote an op-ed piece on the subject condemning Amis and he responded with an open letter to "The Independent" which the newspaper printed in full. In it, he stated his views had been misrepresented by both Alibhai-Brown and Eagleton. In an article in