Friends

Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens both have autobiographical books out . That's Hitchens on the left ; the guy in the middle is James Fenton.

The WSJ is on the case:

They were first introduced by a mutual friend in 1973, when Mr. Hitchens was beginning his career at British magazine the New Statesman and Mr. Amis was about to publish his first novel, "The Rachel Papers." Through the years, they've occasionally chased after the same women, defended one another publicly during media storms and scandals, met for regular dinners with their mutual friends Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, the poet James Fenton and Salman Rushdie, and supported each other through marriages and divorces. "James Fenton once said wearily, 'You and the Hitch ought to get married,' " Mr. Amis says.

.......

Mr. Hitchens writes about how Mr. Amis shaped his writing, describing how his friend often underlined clichés or misused words in his essays and articles and handed him the marked up pages like a disapproving professor. It was Mr. Amis who taught him not to subordinate style to substance when crafting an argument, Mr. Hitchens says.

"He wrote to me recently saying he thought I'd misused the word 'infamous,'" Mr. Hitchens says. "I'm absolutely sure this is an injustice on his part."

Mr. Amis says Mr. Hitchens rarely requires his editing these days, except when it comes to punctuation. "He's touchingly all thumbs with the colon and the semi colon," he says.