Julian Barnes on Flaubert's Parrot

One evening in 1983, I was having a drink with Kingsley Amis. He made the mistake of asking me what I was working on. I made the mistake of telling him. I made the further mistake of not looking across at him, in order the better to concentrate. My account would have involved words such as "Flaubert" and "parrot" and perhaps, as an indicator of generic category, the phrase "an upside-down sort of novel". As I was nearing the end of my preliminary outline - still with some way to go - I glanced up, and was confronted with an expression poised between belligerent outrage and apoplectic boredom. It was the sort of look pioneered by Evelyn Waugh and now more or less extinct in literary society...