Martin Amis 1949 - 2023

When Martin Amis died in May, I caught the announcement at the tail end of a TV news crawl. Hoping I’d misread the flash, I Googled Amis’s name. The top search result offered the standard précis of his Wikipedia entry. “Martin Amis,” it began, “is an English novelist …” 

The present tense was heartening. Maybe I’d been seeing things. Then I clicked through to the full wiki, which began: “Martin Amis was an English novelist …” 

So it was true. Wikipedia had absorbed the news and moved on, but Google’s webcrawler was still in denial. I therefore had one last chance to think of Amis as a living presence, before watching him vanish for good into the past tense ... [read more]