Many a male Amis reader owes his smoking habit to the author.

The novelist Kevin Power is one who thought he'd quit for good, until he spotted Amis and Isabel Fonseca walking on the grounds of Ireland's prestigious Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas.

Peeling off from his friends, Power sidled up and asked Amis for a lighter. Amis obliged and handed Power a thumb-sized Bic, shortly after which Power became aware that the success of this move had emboldened his cohort to form a crowd around a once discreet scene.

The opportunity to speak to Amis one-on-one came again later that weekend, but as Kevin explains on the episode, he has always thought of Amis both as "a prose presence" and "a friend" to the reader, and as such, there is little more one can hope to gain from having met Amis than is permenantly there for them in his writing.

Amis is unique among novelists in this sense. Even when you listen to his interviews, what you often hear are lines Amis had committed to print somewhere for posterity. Everything he ever wanted to tell us, he told us.

This episode deals with Power's chosen novel, Time's Arrow, which was short-listed for the 1991 Booker Prize, and which Power says uses Amis's "full suite of talents" to portray the atrocities of Auschwitz in reverse, both to darkly comic and deeply moving effect. Frequently overlooked in favour of Amis's trifecta of thick London novels, the slender Time's Arrow is nonetheless one of Amis's most mysterious and morally complex achievements.

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