It can’t help Mr. Amis’s mood that his biographer, Richard Bradford, with whom he cooperated (though did not formally authorize), has delivered a book that is mortifying in its dullness and lack of instinctive feeling for its subject. Reading “Martin Amis: The Biography” is like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves.
The problem, in part, is with Mr. Bradford’s prose. You’re only a few pages into “Martin Amis: The Biography” before you begin confronting sentences like this one, in which words come together as if to commit ritual mass suicide: “Becoming a full-time novelist has no predictable effect upon one’s psyche but it is not too absurd to contend that since we elect to spend much of our conscious existence filtering perception and reality through an oblique variant upon language, a good deal of what we routinely apprehend and recollect is touched by our stock in trade of conceits and distortions.”
-- ‘DWIGHT GARNER's review of 'Martin Amis: The Biography,’ by Richard Bradford in the New York Times, Published: December 4, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/books/martin-amis-the-biography-by-richard-bradford.html