Martin Amis author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. In 2002 Amis published "", a devastating history of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics
Kingsley Amis music, of which Amis was not a part — the book's relatively impressive command of musical terminology and opinion shows both Amis's amateur devotion to music and the almost journalistic capacity of his intelligence to take hold of a subject which interested him. That intelligence is similarly on display in, for instance, the presentation of ecclesiastical matters in "The Alteration", when Amis was neither a Roman Catholic nor for that matter a devotee of any church. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Amis regularly produced essays and criticism, principally for journalistic publication. Some of these were collected in 1968 into