Or this could just be a spoiling tactic to push C&N into paying a higher price," he saidInstitutional investors welcomed the news One said: "It is always nice when an auction develops. We are looking forward to next week."One analyst said Thomson's advisers would love to secure a deal at 170p per share. "Then they could say to shareholders: 'OK, it hasn't been a very good investment, but you've got your money back and had a cheap holiday' [from Thomson's Founders Club offer to its 500,000 founder shareholders]."Industry experts said that if Preussag does successfully bid for Thomson, C&N could seek a merger deal with Airtours. That deal would face no competition problems in either the UK or Germany, but would create a powerful European force.Analysts say C&N needs a deal as its two shareholders, Lufthansa and Karstadt, want to float the business next year. To do this it needs to extend its scope beyond Germany where its Condor Neckermann travel brand is a major player.It is thought Preussag has more financial muscle for a bid battle than C&N. Preussag is publicly quoted in Germany and has the backing of investors to move further from its metal-bashing roots.. "I feel as though I've done these things before, and am glazedly compelled to do them again." So the homicidal narrator of Martin Amis's fourth novel, Other People, winds up that uncanny parable about the damage that telling stories can do and about the urge to repeat them, obsessively, until they turn out right.

The burden of repetition, and the hope that a new story, a revised version, will wipe out all the error and misery of the past, runs like a secret thread through the work of Amis junior. "I feel as though I've done these things before, and am glazedly compelled to do them again." So the homicidal narrator of Martin Amis's fourth novel, Other People, winds up that uncanny parable about the damage that telling stories can do and about the urge to repeat them, obsessively, until they turn out right. The burden of repetition, and the hope that a new story, a revised version, will wipe out all the error and misery of the past, runs like a secret thread through the work of Amis junior. Martin Amis has grown ubiquitous over the past 20 years: the brooding public face of British baby-boomer fiction, and a symbol, too, of the life changes that strike its consumers. So there's plenty of "glazed compulsion" in media treatments of his life and work I've certainly done these things before. My first time came a decade ago, when I interviewed Amis about London Fields - another novel narrated by an inventive psychopath.He then worked, a mile from his home, in a flat at the funkier, shabbier end of W11. In one small room stood the dartboard and table-football kit: mind-clearing pastimes, but also misleading props that gave rise to all manner of rubbishy speculation about the author as a patron of New Lads.

The darts, however, did come in handy for the arrows-obsessed thug Keith Talent in London Fields - his finest, and most purely Dickensian, tragi-comic creation.Next door, where the old manual typewriter clattered and the fag butts accumulated, the bookshelves gave his real game away. Sets of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov announced the true Amis inspirations. A copy of Robert Jay Lifton's book The Nazi Doctors sat on the table. Lifton's ground-breaking study of science in hell paved the way for his next novel, Time's Arrow. This bold Holocaust fiction - the only Amis novel to reach the Booker shortlist - adopts a stray idea from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It runs the reel of Nazi history backwards; this reverse-gear storytelling makes the dead awaken. So a re-telling of past woes, in this most extreme of cases, does eradicate the pain of history.You might say that Martin Amis was born to the principle of redemption via repetition.

On 27 August 1949, his father Kingsley - then an Oxford research student, but soon to gain a post as an English lecturer in Swansea - wrote to Philip Larkin with a sigh of relief that the two-day-old baby had emerged "less horrifying in appearance" than his older brother, Philip. A week later, however, Kingsley added that the newcomer had "one of the most protesting faces I ever saw".Now, with the publication next week of his memoir Experience, the correction of accounts has moved from a motif of the fiction to a linchpin of the life. "Experience is the only thing we share equally," claims the book, prompted in large part by the need to make a public peace with Kingsley (who died in 1995). Distorted records will be straightened out, monstrous fibs put to the sword - and all in prose of a clarity and modesty that contrasts violently with the trademark Amis pyrotechnics.From the extracts so far printed, it would seem that Amis has one huge false tale, above all, in his sights - one big lie that subsumes all the gossip about marriages and money, rivalry and dentistry.

That is the belief that the young writer was spared - and must be cursed for being spared - the usual anguish of the human race when, by following in a famous parent's footsteps, he "took over the family pub".Amis used that analogy in an interview this week, trying to explain why some parts of the British media detest him so much - sheer envy at the pampered guv'nor's kid, he thinks. Yet it first occurs (although he didn't say so) in the mouth of the fictional character called "Martin Amis" in his 1984 novel, Money. Thanks to the brilliant verbals of its ruthless, hapless narrator, John Self, the book made a huge, lingering, splash. Yet it also ushered in a transition that brought his creator as much grief as glory. Martin Amis, the well-connected young novelist and newspaper feature writer, became "Martin Amis", the icon of his literary age, as open to desecration as icons always are.Experience, it seems clear, represents a heartfelt attempt to dump those quotation marks.