In one of his funnier essays, included in the collection The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis launched a leisurely assault on the novelist Thomas Harris for his abortive latest installment of the Hannibal Lecter series, Hannibal. The author had lost it, developing a laughable romantic infatuation with his cannibal creation. He’d “gone gay” for Lecter, Amis cackled. (Amis was fond of gay jokes: witness the fun he had at the expense of Robert Bly’s masculinist manifesto Iron John, when he realized that “iron” was rhyming slang for “poof.”)

Just eight years later, Amis wrote an admiring, spaniel-eyed essay lamenting the downfall of Tony Blair. Blair was on his way out thanks to an apparatchik-led coup, prompted in part by the leadership ambitions of his successor, Gordon Brown, and an attempt on the part of party grantees to rebrand Labour after a decade of hawkishness and neoliberalism. In his eulogy for Blair’s career, Amis admits confiding in the former leader that he had been “feeling protective of my Prime Minister” amid all the public nastiness. There you go, I thought: another talented author goes gooey over a serial killer. The battle against cliché is conclusively lost.