Martin Amis has been, from his first appearances in print, an accomplished and thoroughly professional reviewer and journalist: lucid, concise, informed, informative, funny, perceptive and provocative. He has also been unusual for his close focus on style. The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (2001) is his third collection of reviews and essays previously published in newspapers and magazines. Unlike his two previous collections, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986) and Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), it contains no interviews but it is considerably longer; whereas The Moronic Inferno contained 27 pieces and Visiting Mrs Nabokov 33, The War Against Cliché assembles 99 reviews and essays spanning 29 years of journalism. They make up a substantial volume of 506 pages in the hardback edition (including an Index, which is...
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 September 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10622, accessed 09 June 2026.]
