INTERESTING SMACKDOWN OF MARTIN AMIS but gets one thing very wrong: Simon Carr opens his review with, “There are very few novelists of our generation (I’m assuming you’re 50) whom we can quote by heart. Perhaps there aren’t any. When you cast back over your reading list — Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Sebastian Faulkes, Salman Rushdie, David Lodge, Clive James, even — what are your favourite lines? Anything spring to mind? At all?”

I’ve never read a single one of those authors. But I did read a review of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh once, and it quoted this terrific parenthetical description of an Iranian restaurant in Bombay, called the Sorryno: “(so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie Magazine, No Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No Feletone Calls, No Incoming With Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change, and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume — It Is How We Like, and No Musical Request — All Melodies Selected Are to Taste of Prop).”

For some reason, that has stuck with me for more than six years. Good stuff.