The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, review: 'black humour'
I
n the late Seventies a group of ambitious young writers assembled for boozy Friday lunches at Bursa, a Turkish-Cypriot kebab house on the fringes of Bloomsbury distinguished by its proximity to the offices of The New Statesman. The literary editor of that magazine, Martin Amis, was by all accounts the star of a show that included James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and Ian McEwan. Numerous memoirs attest to an intensity of raillery that was by turns intellectually pyrotechnical and frankly puerile. Amid such a crowd it is hard to imagine Julian Barnes getting a word in.
