All artists, in a sense, elect their own precursors – declaring themselves for or against this or that canonical idol, promoting (as a rule) those who have proved most useful to their own self-fashioning, and banishing those from whom there is nothing worthwhile to be learned. Novelists in particular are great makers of personal pantheons – although very few novelists have been as consistently frank about their fetishes as Martin Amis. Reading Amis’s literary criticism – the essays and reviews collected in The Moronic Inferno (1986), Visiting Mrs. Nabokov (1993), The War Against Cliché (2001), and now The Rub of Time – you quickly discover that the Amis Canon shakes down to an austerely cultivated handful of Approved Writers. Shakespeare, John Updike, JG Ballard, William Burroughs (once upon a time), Anthony Burgess (sort of), Philip Roth, Iris Murdoch (maybe), Joseph Heller (the early stuff), James Joyce (ditto), Philip Larkin, Don DeLillo (with reservations), Jane Austen … Oh, and don’t forget Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, whom Amis describes, in the new book, as his “Twin Peaks”.

These are the writers about whom Amis has written most feelingly and most often, and a good number of them duly shuffle onstage in the course of The Rub of Time to be bigged up or shot down, according to the iron laws of the Amisian aesthetic standard. Updike is briefly praised (“Updike’s prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception”), before his final volume of short stories, My Father’s Tears (2009), is dissected and found to consist of “a blizzard of false quantities”. DeLillo is admired (“this luminous talent”) but then there are those pesky reservations (“The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go”). Bellow, of course, is handsomely lauded (“His was and is a pre-eminence that rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy”), and escapes censure. So too does Nabokov (“the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky”) – although upon revisiting the darker precincts of the master’s oeuvre, Amis finds himself no longer quite so keen to defend or excuse VN’s lifelong fascination with the sexual despoliation of prepubescent girls (“You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness”).