“I’ve got the fucking gift for it. Instinct, call it.”

Christian Lorentzen talks to the biographer of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, whose “sloppy-but-tight” playing could have got a lesser man fired.

Kingsley Amis’s “most unpleasant” hero.It’s fair to say that in the late 1950s Kingsley Amis was riding high. In 1954, Lucky Jim had made him the leading novelist of his generation. He had held off an attempt by a new boss to have him fired for “in…