THE TELEGRAPH: A battle has broken out between two of the country's literary titans with one, the prominent Marxist intellectual Terry Eagleton, accusing the other, the novelist Martin Amis, of being Islamophobic.
Prof Eagleton says that Amis has abandoned traditional Western values of liberalism following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. In an introduction to the 2007 edition of his classic book, Ideology: An Introduction, Prof Eagleton attacks the views of "Amis and his ilk" for taking up cudgels against Islam instead of propounding tolerance and understanding.
The attack also extends to Amis's novelist father, the late Kingsley Amis.
Prof Eagleton calls Kingsley Amis "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, selfhating reviler of women, gays and liberals".
He adds: "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase".
Prof Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic for 30 years, has increasingly turned his pen against Left-leaning writers for selling out to the Establishment, but his new introduction reserves special scorn for Amis Jnr, the author of novels such as London Fields and Money.
The spark is a controversial essay written by Amis last year, the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of New York's Twin Towers, in which he said that "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".
In The Age of Horrorism, Amis argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between Islam and Islamism.
The novelist suggested "strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan", preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation. Martin Amis essay 'like work of BNP thug' (more) By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
Mark Alexander
