Martin Amis expertly rolls his own cigarettes. Promoting his odd memoir, Experience, Amis required a special, smoking, room for his interviews in the Hotel Vancouver. Packing the tobacco in the blue white paper, Amis grants himself a moment to consider what he wants to say: a pause to avoid the hackneyed or the obvious.

"The more I review" he said licking a finished smoke, "the more I realize a reviewer really can only quote." In The War Against Cliché Amis explains, "Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence. Or semi-hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue."

At fifty three, Amis is pulling away from his generation of English writers. His novels embody a readable post-modern style, engaging with ideas as well as character. His non-fiction, especially the 1986 Moronic Inferno and his memoir, Experience, is deeply personal and driven by a sense of hip knowingness. His criticism, in spite of his often ironic pose, reflects the hard training, the sharp expectations, of a famously cantankerous father and his chosen alter-father, Saul Bellow. His cast of mind, his surprising primness, resonates with the stoney echoes of a thirty year old Oxford First in English.

Take Amis’s gentle deflation of Bill McKibben’s, much touted The End of Nature:

"To put it simply, Mr. McKibben lacks weight of voice. Speaking on behalf of all human life...Mr. McKibben (or shall I call him Bill?) is throughout a puzzled and guileless presence...Bill is always biking and hiking (though not always grammatically: ‘A forty-minute hike brings the dog and I to the top of the hill"), always swimming and paddling; he exults in "the rippling muscular joy’ of his body and is pleased to by his nice house in the Adirondacks with its many eco-conscious features, including a fax machine that ‘makes for graceful, environmentally sound communication’."

Amis lets McKibben’s own words caricature him as a remarkably self-satisfied, leisured alarmist for whom "the death of just about everything" is mainly a lifestyle issue.

Reading Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest Amis admits "I never dreamed Vidal would have me wiping my eyes and staring wanely out of the window and emitting strange sighs (many of them frail and elderly in timbre)." But Amis is happy to mock Vidal’s perfectly two-faced, startlingly cynical, existence. "Towards the end of the book, Vidal confides that he dislikes social gatherings. Still, this hater of parties clearly went to several thousand of them, perhaps just to make sure." On heterosexuality: "Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice – registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper – is just a sorry state of self hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda."

Juxtaposing registry offices and disposable diapers as icons of heterosexuality is a deep, ironic bow to Vidal with a stage wink to anyone who, like Amis, has kids. Amis expects his readers to know Vidal is talking nonsense and delight in just how well Vidal does it.

The reviews in War are mostly short, less than a 1000 words. Amis aims for pithy. On Hillary Clinton, "It Takes a Village looks like a book and feels like a book but in important respects it isn’t a book....it is a 300 page press release." A backhanded opening for Iris Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil "Iris Murdoch’s fiction is habit forming, which is just as well, since her oeuvre now outbulks that of Tolstoy of George Eliot."

War is shot through with these barbed one liners. Book reviewers, after all, are asked to make quick judgements engagingly. In England, where reviewing is a blood sport, writing fast and funny makes for more reviewing work.

Literary criticism, written at greater length, is more often about what should be read and why. Funny is not the point and even the best reviewer can bog down: Amis simply takes the opportunity to replace his fluent one liners with a dust dry wit.

In his longer Atlantic Magazine pieces collected at the end of War, Amis reconsiders Don Quixote, ("While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw–that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it."), Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses, The Adventures of Augie March and Lolita.

Amis meticulously scrutinizes each of these grand books. On the frustrations of Ulysses: "This writer has the power to take you anywhere (nothing is beyond him); but he keeps taking you where you don’t want to go." On Saul Bellow’s language, "Why is ‘loud-played music’ so much better than ‘loud’? Because it suggests wilfulness, vulgarity and youth, whereas ‘loud’ is just loud. Augie March isn’t written in English; its job is to make you feel how beautiful American is."

Unsupported, these sorts of comments would be so much shop-queue monologue. But Amis’ precise, painstaking readings are anachronistic searches for real evidence. Like his hand rolled cigarettes, Amis’ literary essays revive a largely lost, pre-book chat, concern with craft. He doesn’t need to roll his own any more than he needs to find exactly the right quotation to make his arguments: but the stern countenances of Kingsley, Saul and Oxford goad Amis on.