Legendary British gasbag and aged enfant terrible Martin "My Struggle" Amis has decided, only six and one-half years after the September 11 attacks that – wait for it – he's against them.

To pay down that second mortgage on his Islington maisonette, Amis has recycled a rag bag of essays already inflicted on British newspaper readers on the general subject of Islamic terrorism, about which he knows as much as any regular watcher of the O'Reilly Factor.

After a careful two-paragraph analysis of the history of the rise of Islamic extremism, during which Amis takes full account of the wretched colonial maladministration of his forebears, including the arbitrary boundaries they drew, the tangled relationships among different branches of Islam, and the failure of Middle Eastern states to develop democratic institutions and viable post-industrial economies, Kingsley's boy blames it all on the bloody wogs who talk funny, look funny, and won't queue up at the taxi rank.

We're guessing that he's got other profound insights borrowed from his father for the reader to sink his teeth into, including choleric tirades against the bloody Americans, the bloody frogs, and the bloody Jews. With gruel as thin as this, readers won't need the tens of thousands of pounds of dental work Amis invested in to get it down. They will, however, have to be able to suppress their gag reflex. 

Three hundred [Surely, thirty? – Ed.] years ago, Germaine Greer made quite a splash with a feminist tome arguing – well, we read it in our youth and we're still not sure what she was arguing, other than the evil sexism inherent in women shaving their legs.

After a blizzard of publicity, including a beaver shot that was the era's equivalent of the Paris Hilton sex tape, Germaine slagged around Europe and Israel, lost her looks and retired to the quiet life of a middle-aged English country madwoman.

Now she's put down her mandrake roots and henbane tea long enough to imagine a biography of Ann Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare, whom we're beginning to think was the last English author not to make a jackass of himself in public.

Since the historical record is just this side of void, Germaine's got plenty of time and ink to expatiate on whatever she'd like, including the undoubted sexism of Elizabethan England, where even the Queen had to shave her legs.  At least Good Queen Bess kept them well-covered and, according to legend, together. The elderly grandiose Englishwomen of this century could do worse than to follow suit. 

Alfred A. Knopf must have an insatiable appetite for the musings of overexposed loudmouths (see above) – the publishing house, not the man himself, who must be spinning in his sarcophagus at the depths plumbed by what was once the gold standard of American publishing.

Exhibit B is Barbara Waters' 612-page tale of her rise from daughter of celebrity hanger-on to . . . celebrity hanger-on. Known if at all today as the orange-haired harridan on an unwatchable morning TV gabfest, she once tried to pass herself off as a pioneering newswoman. After all, she did pioneer the use of Vaseline to soften the focus of the TV cameras.

Speaking of reputation, perhaps realizing that her tales of forgotten ABC and NBC hosting stints in a previous century were less than riveting, she's enhanced her memoir with recollections of mattress thrashing with unattractive old men, including former Senator Ed Brooke, Alan Greenspan, and the entire starting lineup of the 1955 New York Yankees. Let's just say when Barbara was in the game, everyone was hitting homers.

And if you shell out thirty depreciated dollars for this twaddle, you're even easier than she was.