The Amis-Eagleton controversy: The British literary elite and the "war on terror"

Amis then proceeds to claim that the indigenous populations of Italy and Spain are set to halve over the next 35 years and that “this entails certain consequences.”

His remarks have a definite historical resonance—one with a far longer and even more sinister pedigree than when Margaret Thatcher said that Britain was being “swamped by an alien culture” in 1979.

Amis’s Guardian article was the latest salvo in a dispute that began after literary theorist Professor Terry Eagleton of the University of Manchester took issue with remarks Amis made in an interview in the Times last year. Shortly after the transatlantic terror alert of that year, Amis was reported to have said:

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s 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