Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes,Martin Amisprovides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike:Larkin and Rushdie;Greene and Pritchett;Ballard and BurgessandNicholson Baker;John Updike- warts and all. Vigorously zipping across to Washington, he exposes the double-think of nuke-speak; in New Orleans, the Republican Convention gets a going over. And then there's sport: he visits the world of darts and its disastrous attempt to clean itself up; dirty tricks in the world of chess; and some brisk but vicious poker withAl AlvarezandDavid Mamet.  To this tantalizing nonfiction collection,Martin Amisbrings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels.  Throughout, he offers razor-sharp takes on such subjects as:American politics:"If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily dreamless: eight years of Do Not Disturb."Chess:"Nowhere in sport, perhaps in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical... My chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a typewriter producing King Lear.""Thirty-odd essays—culled from a dozen years of published encounters between master stylist Amis (Time's Arrow, 1991, etc.) and English-speaking literati and other contemporary phenomena — in a collection as well-honed and readable as it is wide-ranging...An amiable but keen-eyed raconteur, Amis reveals as much about himself as he does his subject, with impressions of the moment melded into insightful commentary on the [subject]...  excursions that will enhance Amis's reputation as a polished, peripatetic critic - a highly literate observer of the monuments and foibles of our age."  -Kirkus Reviews