Some writers make poor critics because they can only ever describe themselves, so it is greatly to his credit that Martin Amis really does write about Nabokov in his essays about Nabokov, and about Roth in the pieces about Roth. His portrait of Iris Murdoch is more about her presence in life than on the page, and this gap allows in some other thing that is hard to identify – is it sorrow? “I knew Iris; I have respectfully kissed that cunning, bashful, secretive smile” – maybe it’s just Oxford.

His piece on JG Ballard is sublime for managing to illuminate the work of both writers at once, and should stand as a classic in any discussion about influence, but it is hard to see anyone other than Amis in a piece about Saul Bellow’s essays. This reads like a manifesto, a note to self. Bellow is “abnormally alive to social gradations”; a highbrow writer who nonetheless has “a reflexive grasp of the street, the machine, the law courts, the rackets”. He is a “rampant instinctivist”, whose “fictional and non-fictional voices intertwine and cross-pollinate”. Bellow had certain core principles: The writer must “resist the heavy influences” of people such as Flaubert and Marx as well as “the savage strength of the many”, because the imagination has an “eternal naiveté” that he cannot afford to lose.

This advice about authority as well as about the ravening crowd is possibly something Amis could have taken more to heart. For Amis, there is Daddy and there is hoi polloi, there is genius and the tabloids, art and controversy, single and many (you might carefully add Stalin and the masses here). The reader, however, is your friend. According to Bellow, the writer should assume “a certain psychic unity” with his readers, the idea that “others are in essence like me and I am basically like them”.

But, are you, dear reader, like Saul Bellow? Are you, in essence, like Martin Amis? You wish. Dream on.

When I was 20, I picked up Amis’s early novel The Rachel Papers in a bookshop, opened it halfway through, and finished it where I stood. Then I bought it in order to read the first half. It was all voice, all personality, completely thrilling. As a fiction writer, Amis writes close to opinion. He is always putting it up to you somehow, making the reader feel brilliant too. Or a bit stupid. This is the best fun going when everyone is drunk, as they seemed to be in the 1980s, and literary London was like one long dinner party in which everyone knew where you went to school. Amis lets the reader inside, at the table, talking first and checking after, clever as two sticks.

An anti-Trump and pro-women’s rights march in Washington, DC. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Fiction loves a bit of bullshit, or a character who is full of it, so arguing through fiction allows the writer to be right, even when he is being wrong. The essay form is not so capacious, requiring, as it does, a single persona, if not entirely a single point of view. The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and unafraid. You can sit and be like Martin Amis all day, wondering how he could be so right about the Republican party in 2011, so prescient about Trump as early as May 2016. The hierarchy thing, that need to revere older writers, may be a little bit male for some, but male is the way that Amis rolls, which makes him one of the best people on the planet to write about the porn industry (a chivalrous piece, as it happens). He is sweetly sentimental when it comes to the British royal family (why?), funny about tennis, always brilliant about the body, scorching in his refusal of death, its sorrows and humiliations.

There are moments of uncertainty. About “Trump and women”, he says: “This isn’t new.” It must be the simplest sentence in the book and yet we don’t know what he is referring to. “This is a wound with the scab off.” Hard to say where the hurt lies; the women thing is just, perhaps, a general suppuration in the body politic. Any reasonably energetic baby boomer “behaved far more deplorably than Trump”, women included. Did you? Did you really? Trump is, besides, actually a sexual coward. Ah, there you go. Amis is always begging for interruption and fending it off at the same time, busking his way to the best bit, fighting with shadows to snatch the prize.

Sometimes, the feints are just too large. In 2006 he goes to play poker in Las Vegas, and describes the city as “Un-Islamic”. Surely, you think, the word he is looking for is “anti-Puritan”, but the lack of historical or geographical connection does not stop Amis from dragging the wrong world religion through the fleshpots of the Strip. This is less than brilliant, for being specious, and Amis can be brilliant. He is a great believer in semantic rigour; every sentence snaps with an accuracy that is fresh and fierce.

When he is being dodgy – as he has every right to be – he switches tack on either side of a comma, and lets the cadence carry him through. Amis is always getting away with things and then saying, “Who, me?” The problem is surely about authority: this is is the kind of energy you get from people who have been bullied, or indeed from bullies themselves.

In 2010 he complains that a perfectly reasonable opinion about euthanasia results in his being dubbed controversial, then quotes the source of the difficulty, a “sardonic novel” in which he wrote of old people “stinking up the clinics”, and predicted “age wars and chronological cleansing”. Impossible to tell, in this sardonic mode, whether he is accusing society of prejudice against the old, or accusing old people of being unhygienic, or just flailing around. Whatever this is, it is not an argument for euthanasia. It is tedious to unpack all this except to point out that the word “stinking” is the trigger for the “controversy”, which is shorthand, these days, not for argument, but for shame unleashed, hence the general air of shouting and the feeling that we are no further on. Also, and by the way, Amis, in this passage, defaults to images of mass slaughter, the way you do.

Amis is fantastic company until he isn’t. The drop can sometimes be severe, though never so steep as with his friend Christopher Hitchens, another writer who makes the reader feel smart, energised, enlarged, or does until he says something stupid in a really clever way. Take the line that “Women aren’t funny,” by which Hitchens meant, not that women weren’t funny (of course not!), but something else altogether about fucking and showing off and women being enormously and fundamentally in charge of men, which is when you realise that you, the reader, are a woman (I never used to check) and that he is not talking to you, he is talking to someone (Hitchens, Amis himself) born in 1949.

For the most part, with Amis, it’s not so much the woman thing. He does mention and write sympathetically about women, though they tend to be either posh or porn stars (Jessica, Diana, Temptress, Chloe). He suffers from a hyperactive dystopian sense of what Ballard calls the “near after”. His anxieties place him on the edge of the future, which makes him interested in war (and not in a good way). So it is more the religion thing, added to the race thing, complicated by the need to go huge. Maybe you could call it the “rampant instinctivism” thing. Or, the prejudice thing.

“Is Terrorism About Religion?”, asks one of the titles here, giving a whole new meaning to the word “about” (was the Omagh bomb about transubstantiation? Were the Shankill Butchers defending Luther’s 95 theses?) This essay might have been a proper look at the concept of jihad, but it isn’t that. It is an opinion about how hard it is to have a certain kind of opinion, these days. In it, Amis complains about the difficulties of maintaining a discourse that includes “less than reverent generalisations about non-white foreigners” (his italics). “Reverent” is good: there is no doubt that blasphemy is a great subject, but why do you need to make generalisations, and – hang on – who are these foreigner chaps?

Amis has lived in London, Uruguay and New York, which makes him a global citizen, or perhaps a “white foreigner” (or is the term for that an “expat”?). So maybe I am not like Amis, after all, because the first and last time I typed the word “foreigner”, my computer tells me, was in 2002. It is, perhaps, a uniquely British word. And then there’s “non-white”: where does that start – Naples? Really, no one living in Brooklyn talks about foreigners any more, let alone (wow) “non-white foreigners” and just, come on.

And you know I wish I was like Amis, I really do, because, damn, that fool can write, but I am not 20 years old any more, standing in a bookshop all afternoon, trying to afford a book I could not put down. I will, like many of his readers, grow old in a different direction. Still, this collection is full of treasures. And, if you want a good scrap, if you want to feel like Martin Amis while fighting with Martin Amis (which is possibly how he also spends his day), a couple of these pieces will keep you going for a long time.

• The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces, 1996-2016 is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.