Martin Amis hits back at Anna Ford

By Heidi Blake Published: 8:15AM GMT twenty-three February 2010

Previous of Images Next Martin Amis pronounced Anna Ford"s conflict on him was an "unworthy farrago" Photo: RICHARD SAKER Anna Ford indicted Martin Amis of complacency Photo: Jeff Gilbert

The best-selling writer disparaged the former newsreaders "surprise attack" opposite him as an "unworthy farrago" and indicted her of degrading the mental recall of Mark Boxer, her late husband.

Miss Ford, 68, claimed in an open minute last week that "narcissism and incapacity to empathise" was at the base of Mr Amiss annoy about "chaotic perceptions" of him in the press.

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But the 60-year-old writer has retaliated opposite Miss Ford, job her accusations "eagerly ungenerous and self-defeating".

Responding to her minute in The Guardian, he denied that he had smoked over Mr Boxers deathbed and outstayed his acquire given he was flitting time prior to catching a flight. "What lucid chairman "fills in time" at a deathbed?" he wrote.

Miss Ford claimed that Mr Amis had behaved insensitively when he visited her husbands deathbed with Christopher Hitchens, the journalist, days prior to the repository editor died of a brain swelling in 1988.

"You stayed far as well long. You smoked over his bed. I after schooled the length of revisit was not borne only of affection, but you were stuffing in time prior to you held a craft at Heathrow.

"You wrote a square about your feelings and tears as you left. I saw no justification of these," she wrote, in a minute to The Guardian.

But Mr Amis has hotly denied that he and Mr Hitchens behaved with "such improbable callousness" towards Mr Boxer, who was his close friend.

"We both desired him, and still weep him. Many did, and most do. He was a strenuously pleasant man," he wrote.

The writer pronounced he had been "overwhelmed" by tension after exchanging his last difference with Mr Boxer, but had managed to enclose his tears until reaching his car.

He went on to indicate that Miss Fords conflict on him and, by extension, Mr Hitchens, would have dissapoint her late husband. "I consternation how it serves Mark"s memory, or warms his ghost, to indicate that his dual clinging friends (I and Christopher) behaved with such improbable callousness," he wrote.

But he certified that one of Miss Fords claims was correct: that he is a "useless godfather" to her daughter, Claire.

Miss Ford wrote in her minute that when Claire was celebration of the mass English at university "she pronounced she was study Martin Amis and did I know anything about him? Oddly enough, I told her, he"s your godfather."

"We invited you to lunch. You paid meagre courtesy to Claire and she hasn"t listened from you since."

Mr Amis, the son of the writer Kingsley Amis, has mostly been indicted of misogyny. He not long ago caused debate by looming to call for euthanasia booths on travel corners for aged people.

He complained in an essay in the Guardian progressing this month of "reckless distortions" and "chaotic perceptions" about him in the press.

Miss Ford, who has well known him for thirty years, said: "If you"re going to be a argumentative writer, you have to design people to have an perspective about you and you have to take the severe with the smooth.

"It"s this unattractive, juvenile whingeing that unequivocally gets me."