For a publisher, Martin was the best friend and guide you could have. His literary judgements were always pertinent and given in a spirit of informed scholarship. Martin never allowed his likes and dislikes to be clouded by the demands of the market-place. He rightly left that job of mercantile compromise to the publisher. In the years that he advised Serpent’s Tail, we published on his recommendation two Nobel Prize winners, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Muller and other extraordinary writers like Hubert Fichte and Ernst Weiss. An afternoon spent talking with Martin was a cornucopia of treats – if you let the conversation go the way he thought it should, you would be rewarded by insights usually relevant and always stimulating. His own writing, of which there is unfortunately too little, was like his conversation a delightful meander in which personal experiences were located in a larger historical picture. Rarely was learning so rewarding an experience.
He is already missed. Pete Ayrton