The locomotive we rode in had a rating system, and one strictly enforced. Its first-class carriage was a mobile drawing-room, a thickly carpeted boudoir, with sofas, paintings, and swaying chandelier. Second class was a bourgeois barber shop of leather and mirror and antimacassar. But when I travelled alone I always chose the bare wood of third, for a reason that still makes me feel slightly serpentine. In those packed, silent, orderly carriages there was better chance of seeing something you never saw in the Protestant north: nursing mothers. And although the back of the baby’s head looked nice enough, I have to confess that the bit I liked came before and after. Nobody else watched; nobody else noticed. In a country where tourists in bikinis were arrested at gunpoint, there was still this virtuous nudity, invisible to all except a furtive young foreigner whose thoughts were no longer pure.

Experience, 2000

(Swansea, 1949). Martin Amis is a British novelist. He studied at Exeter College in Oxford. He is also the son of the writer Kingsley Amis. He had a great success with his first book, The Rachel Papers, which earned him the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. His works include novels, short stories, autobiographical tales and essays. He has collaborated with various newspapers and publications such as The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, The Observer or The New York Times. Other titles followed including Time´s Arrow (1991), Night Train (1997), or theautobiography volume Experience (2000).