Martin Amis' Controversies

In August 2006, Martin Amis sat down for a wide-ranging interview in which his lips were perhaps loosened by too much wine. “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this?” Amis said. “There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.” Critic Terry Eagleton likened the remarks to “the ramblings of a British National Party thug,” and Amis was widely criticized and eventually backpedaled. “When I made this rather stupid suggestion, or talked about the urge to make the stupid suggestion to make Muslims put their house in order, I was at the peak of my anger,” he said in March 2008, about an aborted terrorist plot. “Everyone else’s anger gets respected all over the place but not that of a normally very peaceful British novelist.”