In an open minute to Martin Amis, Anna Ford accuses the bard of "narcissism" and an "inability to empathise". Photograph: Juan Martin Msis/EPA
One is a well read titan, arguably the majority strange stylist of his generation, sparkling chronicler of the absurdities of the postmodern times, bard of a little of this country"s majority appropriate – and best-known – complicated fiction. Or, if you prefer, an conceited misogynist with a little rarely upsetting views and a repute as a sequence womaniser who would have got nowhere but his dad.
The alternative is an superb former newsreader, cool, grand and now in use as a non-executive executive of J Sainsbury plc, where she chairs the board"s corporate shortcoming committee. Or, if you prefer, an oft lusted-after and plain-speaking beauty with no time for patronising males and a gusto for throwing booze over them at parties.
When the dual fell out, it was never going to be pretty. But the argument brewing in between Anna Ford and Martin Amis looks similar to being some-more than customarily ugly: in an open but rarely personal minute to Amis in the Guardian today, Ford accuses the bard of "narcissism", an "inability to empathise" and an rejection to see "closely and overtly at himself" in propinquity to alternative people.
"I usually non-stop up my Guardian last week," Ford pronounced yesterday, "and I thought: Oh, for heaven"s sake, there"s Martin whingeing again. He unequivocally ought to usually stop. It angry me so majority I motionless to write a letter. It"s a For Heaven"s Sakes letter, really."
Amis"s article, in last Saturday"s Guardian Review, argued that far from "stirring up the press" by being "controversial-on-purpose" at your convenience he has a new book out (his latest, The Pregnant Widow, was published this month), it is newspapers that stir themselves up by misrepresenting him. Recent headlines such as "Martin Amis: "Women have as well majority energy for their own good"" and "Amis calls for euthanasia booths on travel corners" were, he said, radically down to the media"s own "chaotic perceptions", formed in at slightest one example on "a hotchpotch of half-quotes".
Getting "taken up (and fast distorted) in the press is not something I do," he wrote . "It"s something the newspapers do. The usually chairman who can try by artful means to get the fourth estate is Katie Price."
For Ford – who has well well known Amis for 30-odd years, but concedes that "as a feminist I don"t suffer celebration of the mass him; he competence be one of the majority renowned writers, but I think his perspective to women is rarely questionable" – the writer"s censure was a blubber as well many. "Obviously when you are an bard you put your work in to the public domain," she said.
"But Martin seems to think that carrying rarely argumentative views on a series of subjects – chief warfare, Iraq, Muslims – is not going to capture criticism. It seems to me that if you"re going to be a argumentative writer, afterwards 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. He usually ought to stop."
Ford, who late from radio in 2006 after carrying been usually the second lady newsreader at ITN and being on the presenting group for the BBC Six O"Clock News, the Today programme and (briefly) TV-am, is extremely harder on Amis in her letter, asking either the bard competence not be improved receiving "a closer and some-more honest see at himself in propinquity to others" rather than "complaining about forward distortions and pell-mell perceptions".
She additionally relates dual really personal anecdotes about her late husband, the cartoonist Mark Boxer, a close crony of Amis. Amis once visited Boxer in bed prior to prolonged prior to he died of a brain swelling in 1988 not usually out of affection, Ford alleges, but given he was "filling in time prior to a plane". The bard subsequently wrote a square in that he described great as he left; tears of that Ford "saw no evidence".
She additionally says that when one of her dual daughters was investigate English at university celebration of the mass Amis, she was unaware that he was her godfather. "We invited you to lunch," Ford tells Amis. "You paid meagre courtesy to Claire (didn"t even cough up the orthodox five incline approaching from godfathers!) and she hasn"t listened from you since. Can I indicate that this spin of complacency and incapacity to sorrow competence be at the base of your annoy with the press and your need to justice attention?"
Like his father Kingsley, Amis, who left his initial wife, Antonia Phillips, for the American bard Isabel Fonseca, is often indicted of misogyny. Last year, one former girlfriend, Julie Kavanagh, described him as an firmly established womaniser. Kavanagh additionally published a prolonged list of purported Amis lovers and mistresses, several of whom have publicly indicted him of "behaving appallingly".
Ford, a 70s feminist idol as well as a masculine fantasy figure whose looks desirous communication from a associate ITN newsreader, Reginald Bosanquet, was once well well known as "Angry Anna" given of her affinity for vocalization her mind to "bureaucratic, bullying, constantly masculine" BBC bosses. She has never been delayed to reject masculine poise that she considers patronising or sexist.
The maestro broadcaster Sir Robin Day once pronounced "every man in the universe would similar to to nap with Anna Ford". The subsequent time she saw him, at a grassed area party, she called him a "silly old fool" and pushed him over in to a bush. [See footnote.] She additionally famously threw a potion of booze over Jonathan Aitken in ire at his piece in her sacking from TV-am.
Amis declined to criticism on Ford"s letter, observant – with a little patience – that he would cite to verbalise to her personally.
• This essay was nice on twenty-two Feb and 10 Mar 2010. The strange pronounced that Anna Ford was ITN"s initial womanlike newsreader. This has been corrected. Anna Ford says that the majority steady Robin Day version is incorrect. In the garden-party confront with Day, she pronounced to a crony who was with her, "Shall we pull him [Day] in to this bush?" but did not do so, and walked away. The strange Day allude to was, she notes: "You usually got your pursuit in radio given men longed for to nap with you."
Author"s feudsA section of arguments• Martin Amis and the Marxist well read censor Professor Terry Eagleton were intent in a really open row over purported Islamophobia after a 2006 talk with the Times in that Amis pronounced Muslims ought to "suffer until they get their residence in order", with measures together with deportation, curtailing of freedoms, and frame acid "until it hurts the total village and they begin removing difficult with their children". Eagleton subsequently described Amis"s father, Kingsley Amis, as a "racist, antisemitic boor; a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals", and added: "Amis fils has obviously schooled some-more from [his father] than how to spin a comely phrase."
• Amis and the bard Christopher Hitchens fought over Amis"s 2002 book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, in that Amis argued that rejection and a blind connection to Marxism had led horse opera intellectuals to omit the crimes of Stalin. Hitchens, an old friend, was between the accused. In a monster reply in The Atlantic, Hitchens in spin indicted Amis of "solipsism", and of "insulting" the memories of Stalinism"s most leftwing opponents. "Hard work," he wrote, "is concerned in the investigate of history. Hard dignified work, too. We don"t get majority benefit in that charge from tear-jerking secondhand observations."
• Amis fell out with an additional old friend, the writer Julian Barnes, over Amis"s preference to dump Barnes"s wife, Pat Kavanagh, as his well read representative after twenty-two years. Barnes subsequently wrote to Amis expressing the goal that he competence be each bit as successful as dual alternative clients of Andrew ""The Jackal"" Wylie, his new agent, namely Salman Rushdie (then underneath a fatwa) and Bruce Chatwin (who died of Aids). Barnes sealed off, Amis wrote, with "two difference consisting of 7 letters. Three of them are Fs."
• In 2007, the writer and screenwriter Ronan Bennett indicted Amis of injustice in the Guardian, observant that assorted of his comments on Muslims done him guilty of "as unpleasant an coming out of extremist view as any open figure has done in this nation for a really prolonged time".
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