Writers (to use one of the grand, dubious categoricals that Amis loved) generally have a golden decade, give or take: a stretch when the gears of their talent and imagination fall into alignment and they produce the work on which their reputations rest. Vladimir Nabokov reached his moment in late middle age, from the mid-nineteen-fifties to the mid-sixties (“ Lolita,” “ Pnin,” “ Nabokov’s Dozen,” “ Pale Fire”). Saul Bellow probably did around the same time, too (“ The Adventures of Augie March,” “ Herzog”). Amis’s reputation-making period extended from the mid-eighties into the nineties, when he produced, one after the other, “Money,” “ London Fields,” “Time’s Arrow,” and “ The Information.” Those novels not only showed his style in all its rhetorical range but followed the energy of a time when Britain, buoyed and buffeted by the Thatcherite push to enterprise and global commerce, found itself reaching toward crass New World ways.

Literally, forced to move. It means that whoever has to move has to lose. If it were my turn now, you’d win. But it’s yours. And you lose.’ This is precisely the response his own writing evoked in so many others. I can remember exactly that sensation when, aged 13, I read Other People in 1981. Almost four decades on, it is hard to convey how much of a haymaker he delivered to literary culture in 1984, in his first longer novel, Money. Just savour its first paragraph:But there is no escape from Money, its claws fastening more as one tries to escape. John cannot help it. He cannot hide from Money. And it is his greed, his inability to take control which brings his doom. When he sits there defeated, a part of me can sympathize with him, for the ruin he is faced with, is brought about by a being a part of the society where money is supreme and where ‘thinking’ spirals downwards as debauchery, greed and lust rise to unleash their power.

Hitchens retaliated via an article in the Atlantic, but the friendship was apparently unaffected. “We never needed to make up,” Amis told the Independent in 2007. “We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless.” When Hitchens died, in December 2011, Amis delivered his eulogy.

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In person, Amis appeared to live so comfortably in his own head that he wasn’t always in touch socially. At the height of his youthful swagger, he published a kind of how-to book for video games: “ Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines,” which, toward the end of his life, even he grudgingly admitted wasn’t, you know, his best work. (And Amis rarely admitted he wrote anything less than perfect—this was an unexpectedly endearing quality.) To this day, I still smart from my first visit to the Bayswater flat where he did his writing. We sat chatting. He rolled a cigarette and spontaneously revealed that he had just looked at how much money he had in his bank account. “I had an idea,” he said. “I was wrong . . . by a factor of ten.” I took this in, doing various calculations in my head. After all, I was the guy with an overdraft trying to put out a literary magazine. In Britain, the Spectator, not always an Amis fan, said of Money that it was “an epitaph to that decade (the 1980s) much more authentic and searching than The Bonfire of the Vanities or Less Than Zero.” Three more from Martin Amis Lipsky, David (5 July 2010). "What to Read This Summer". Time. Archived from the original on 26 July 2010 . Retrieved 28 February 2011. One of Time's 100 best novels in the English language--by the acclaimed author of Lionel Asbo: State of England and London Fields Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis at the Guildhall in London for the 1991 Booker prize awards. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA