If the Amis to be lazy then take a bow, Martin! The Rub Of Time: Essays And Reportage 1986-2016 Martin Amis Cape €20.50 ★★★★★

If you want to read something punchy and droll about writers, politics, sport or celebrity, Martin Amis is a dependable source. His first essay collection, The

Moronic Inferno, was a sacred text to me after it appeared in 1986.

His latest collection covers the 30 years since, and features some wonderful writing about football, tennis, Philip Larkin and his own dad, Kingsley. But elsewhere there’s a distinct whiff of used stock in the air, not helped by the fact that Amis hired someone else to put the collection together – he couldn’t be bothered himself.

‘Nowadays I look back less and less,’ he writes. ‘Even to check the proofs of a completed work feels like a chore and a distraction.’ It figures.

His unwillingness to update these essays is striking. His tirade against Donald Trump has its moments –‘scowling out from under an omelette of make-up and tanning cream (and from under the little woodland creature that sleeps on his

head)’ – but it was written before Trump won the election last November, so already it feels like yesterday’s news. His piece on Jeremy Corbyn, from two years ago, is breathtakingly feeble. Even if you agree that Corbyn is ‘undereducated’, ‘humourless’ and ‘has no grasp’ of Britain’s ‘national character’, his final verdict is simply out of date: ‘Under him, the Labour Party is no longer Her Majesty’s opposition. There is no opposition.’

Amis’s perspective on British politics, taken from his Brooklyn domicile, rarely felt compelling; now it looks irrelevant.

His more personal essays are the best. He is amusingly sorrowful about ageing and the loss of his tennis game (‘The ball comes over the net like a strange surprise’). He is tender and truthful about Philip Larkin, arguing that, in the long run, the poetry matters more than the life. On his friendship with the late Christopher Hitchens he is sometimes touching and funny but, once again, his indolence astounds.

Instead of a considered obituary of his best friend (who died in 2011) he merely reprints a preface to a Hitchens collection; better to have excerpted something from his memoir Experience. He also ticks off Hitchens for his ‘coldly unfilial’ attack on Saul Bellow and jokes that he has given him this bit of ‘schoolmarm advice’ more than once: ‘Don’t cheek your elders.’ This would be easier to take had Amis not done exactly that to one of his own literary father-figures John Updike 30 pages earlier.

In the matter of dissing one’s former heroes, I am happy to accept that Amis is my elder and indeed my better, and to add that certain books of his are formative in my life. The

Rub Of Time, however, creaks in its joints.

‘His tirade against Trump already feels like yesterday’s news’