Martin Amis thinks big. This is not only to say that he is an ambitious writer, having taken on such large topics as the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and, now, the war on terrorism. It is also to say that he tends to ponder in public. The deep thoughts of this leading literary figure in England, frequently offered up in press interviews, are routinely magnified into sweeping headlines. In his fiction (London Fields, The Rachel Papers, Yellow Dogs, etc.), Amis has sometimes been accused of creating unlikable characters who behave in improbable ways. In his person, he himself has now been found extremely unlikable by much of England’s cultural establishment. For as a card-carrying member of the British Left he has done something most improbable: he has attacked radical Islam.

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