Amis rivals Dickens

The Sharp Side points out the weakness in Ronan Bennett's otherwise welcome response to Martin Amis' non-literary opinions. It takes issue when Bennett commends Ian McEwan's "truthful, moving and humbling" words about the human imagination.

But McEwan's point of view ... also illustrated the limitations of anguished humanism. The hijackers were bad people because they did not consider the humanity of the people they killed. The same criticism could be made of the RAF pilots who drop bombs on Iraq and Afghanistan, but you would never find McEwan making it.

Indeed, and look what happens to public figures who do make it. The Sharp Side ends with a (to me) shocking revelation about Charles Dickens's response the Indian mutiny. Again, Kafka is proved right to recognise "a heartlessness behind [Dickens'] sentimentally overflowing style".