Sam Leith

When I look back over my life, a decade or two from now, when I finally succumb to the strontium smog, I’ll at least be able to pinpoint the moment when I first knew human civilisation was doomed. Ah yes, I’ll think, as I hear scavengers scuttling towards my body across the trashscape, grunting and hooting for meat: that was the moment. That Friday evening, way back in the middle of 2023, when I was spooning out the usual overcooked pasta for the usual undercooked children and I asked them what they’d been up to.  'We found this hilarious thing on YouTube,' my oldest said. 'It was, like, this AI-generated video of Boris Johnson eating raw onions.' Was, like, what? 'Yes,' chipped in the second oldest. 'WHOLE raw onions. It’s hilarious!

I’ve tried to stay out of the trans-rights conversation, honestly I have. There are a number of reasons for this, and not all of them are laziness and cowardice. The main thing is that – though it bears on some important points of principle – it directly affects a relatively tiny proportion of the population and it already gets more coverage than almost any other issue up to and including a major European war.   Gee whiz, holding that centrist line gets harder And for most of the people who get involved in this conversation as journalists, commentators and activists, it rapidly becomes a full-time job. There are a lot of people more willing, and better qualified, to do that job.

If you visited the British Museum’s new exhibition China’s Hidden Century a fortnight ago, you’d have seen a substantial section on the revolutionary woman poet Qiu Jin, with substantial extracts from her poems in Chinese and English displayed in a giant projection. What you might not have noticed was that the translator was not credited anywhere in the physical exhibition. But Yilin Wang, whose translations of those poems appeared in the exhibition, did.  Indeed, Ms Wang, who has won awards for her poetry and has an extensive record as a translator, was more dismayed than that. Not only was she not credited: she hadn’t even been consulted by the British Museum about their use of her work. She was rightly angry.

At the end of the 1920s, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in English as All Quiet On The Western Front. For its readership in this country a devastating, grinding war against an enemy they had been encouraged to think of as bestial and inhuman huns was in recent memory. Here was a book that told how the war had been for those huns in the opposing trenches; that showed it wasn’t all that different for them at all. Nobody, as far as I know, even as our cities were filled with broken, disfigured, disabled and traumatised veterans, attempted to suppress Remarque’s book on the grounds that it encouraged sympathy for Germans. In fact, the only people who tried to suppress it were the Nazis.

Boris Johnson has always been an enthusiastic proponent of the long unfashionable 'great man' theory of history. As he argued in his short biography of Winston Churchill, Churchill was a living refutation of the notion that great men and women are just 'meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history', a 'withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference'. Boris’s own downfall is a magnificent demonstration – though perhaps not of the sort he would have hoped for – that he was onto something. Character does make a difference. It wasn’t 'events, dear boy, events' that did for him – though heaven knows he was rocked by a few of those.

I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had vague memories of his grinning, chipmunk-like face getting up to antics with Gordon the Gopher in the 1990s. I noticed when he was in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, because that was all over the papers. Occasionally I’d see a clip of him on breakfast telly. And then there was the thing where he came out as gay – which seemed to merit an Alan Partridge shrug – and the thing with the Queen’s funeral, which, again, was hard to get worked up about.

When I was not more than nine or ten years old, I sent off in the post for a free poster that I’d seen advertised in a comic. It depicted Superman, whom I held in high regard, scragging a distinctly second-tier villain called Nick O’Teen; the relic of some lame early-eighties anti-smoking campaign. For reasons I can’t now fathom, I burned to have this on my bedroom wall. I remember it now not because of the poster, but because the wait for it to arrive. 'Allow eight weeks for delivery', it said. And it really did take eight weeks to show up – which, when you’re nine and you really, really want a Superman poster, might as well be a lifetime.  The very idea of waiting that long for anything, now, will be incomprehensible to a nine-year-old.

Over the next few days, people will be reaching for certain set phrases about Martin Amis. That he was ‘era-defining’ (though he defined more than one era); that he was ‘genre-defying’ (he defied more than one genre); that he was an ‘enfant terrible’ (it will be wryly noted that he remained an enfant terrible, somehow, into his eighth decade). It's poignant, I think, that a writer who vigilantly waged the career-long battle he called ‘the war against cliché’ will go to his grave heaped with the garlands of the old enemy.  Still, he deserves the content of those tributes if not their form. And it’s not much of a surprise that nobody can write as well about Martin Amis as, in life, he could write about anything else.