'Literary bad boy Amis turns academic' blares the headline in The Australian (no link to the story). 'Enfant terrible turns professor' quips The Guardian, which has put its story online.

Martin Amis will start teaching creative writing at Manchester University.

"A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants," he said, suggesting that the move was as much due to a desire to catch up with the ways of the young as to perform on a new platform, and exercise his talents in a new environment.

"My father (Kingsley Amis) put it very well, he said: 'There comes a point where you think, it's not like that any more.' A social change in the collective consciousness has happened and you feel you are not seeing it."

Some readers might recall Nabokov boning up for his essay at teenage argot by boarding the buses that would carry schoolgirls home from their studies.

But it's an interesting move, and one that may make itself felt in curious ways in Amis' future writings.