They face the camera with the steady, unflinching gaze of the chosen; clever, beautiful and rich, most of them, down from Oxford and apparently with a life of unbroken promise ahead of them. Yet Martin Amis, baby-faced, brooding, and his friend, the writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, each claim to have harboured a suspicion that they would “not only fail, but go under”. Neither did, of course, but the years have seen a terrible harvesting of some of their friends.

Amschel Rothschild, the beautiful, gamin boy with the face like an El Greco portrait, hanged himself in 1996 aged 41. Adam Shand Kydd was found dead in Phnom Penn in 2004, possibly from a drug overdose. Tobias Rodgers, the antiquarian bookseller and notorious giver of parties to which “the famous, the brilliant, the difficult and the unknown” were routinely invited, died in 1997. “He was helpless and somehow unhelpable,” his obituary noted. The writer Candia McWilliam, photographed at 21, all long limbs and limpid eyes, is now blind, suffering a condition called blepharospasm, which means she is unable to lift her eyelids.

There have been marriages, divorces, trysts and partings. The photographer Angela Gorgas first met Amis in 1977 when she and McWilliam shared Amschel Rothschild’s house in London’s Maida Vale. Her images, capturing the spirit of those times, appear on these pages. Gorgas and Amis became engaged a year later, splitting up in 1981. “I won’t talk about why we broke up,” she announces. I wasn’t going to ask. Amis’s relationship history is littered with beautiful girls; mostly clever, well-bred types who could hold their own and to whom he couldn’t or wouldn’t commit. Kingsley, an epic philanderer, encouraged his sons’ promiscuity. When Martin was not quite 16, Kingsley marched him and his brother, Philip, to a shop north of Piccadilly and bought them each a gross of condoms.

Kingsley liked his son’s first novel, The Rachel Papers, but couldn’t get on with his second, Dead Babies: “Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader…,” he complained. Martin claims to recall the exact point at which his father threw Money, his most critically acclaimed work, across the room. Yet he says: “It wasn’t personal, he didn’t like anybody else’s novels either…”, still re-reading Kingsley’s books “because it’s like being in the company of someone at their very, very best”. A better son, perhaps, than Kingsley was a father.

Martin Amis

Everyone is subconsciously petrified as they emerge into adulthood, wondering what they’ve got, physically and emotionally. I had a bad patch with girls in the early 1970s, which I never understood at the time, but what I learnt from it was that if it starts to go wrong, it’s like a fever you carry round with you and it becomes self-fulfilling. A lot of Philip Larkin’s poetry is about this conviction of unattractiveness; it’s as if all women can tell you feel unattractive and then everything you say is somehow slightly off.

Everyone is insecure. The most secure people you know are insecure. It’s almost a component of sanity but it was Tina Brown who got me out of the cycle. I’d been writing some rather louche columns under the pseudonym of Bruno Holbrook, while seedily attending parties. I revealed to Tina, whom I’d just met, that I was Bruno; she was so keen on the columns, and so publicly affectionate, she cleansed me of all the Larkin self-gloom.

The Hutch was handsome and charismatic and still is, but I think in the early 1970s, marginally less successful with women than I was. He doesn’t like me saying this, but I don’t think he really evolved until 1989 when the Berlin wall came down. He’s a bit ideological and when he stopped having to raise his scarred fists to defend the ideals of Trotsky, he really came alive as a writer. We’ve had disagreements, but never any interruption of warm feeling. He was my first love, as it were, that’s for sure.

Amschel’s place, where Angela lived, was close to being a kind of salon and all sorts of odd types would show up there. Otherwise we’d pitch up in people’s flats and we spent a tremendous amount of time eating out, probably because nobody cooked. Christopher and I once worked out we spent a third of our salaries in restaurants. Angela was known as Angela Gorgeous; we were slightly on and off towards the end and didn’t take the plunge, which I think had a lot to do with time of life. Tina [Brown] accused me of never having had my heart broken and there’s something in that. But then you reach a point when you really do want to get married — you want a child — and that feeling didn’t come on me forcefully until my mid-thirties. Christopher used to call this panic in women “the cusp of hell”…

It was decided in the 1960s that there would be sex before marriage. This was terrible news for those who had gone before and caused a great deal of tension between fathers and sons. My father was tremendously permissive and I think that’s part of the reason we were close. There wasn’t any rivalry in that way at all. I minded a lot when he refused to read my books — the first time, it was like a physical blow; he’d identified me as tricksy and postmodern and didn’t make any concessions for me. I was very pleased when he read Time’s Arrow, though, and the pleasure that gave me did make me feel I had been missing out.

What kills us all in the end is the death of people we know. It becomes this terrible weight, it builds up and we can’t take it. I’ve lost some very good friends over the past 10 years; my sister, Sally, died in 2000, which I suppose was alcohol-related and that was awful. I remember reading somewhere you can count on one hand the great American writers who didn’t die of alcoholism. With Kingsley, it was ominously connected to greed and to satiety. “You can’t write all day,” he used to say. “And that leaves a dangerous amount of time left for drinking…”

Christopher Hitchens

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