As literary duels go, this one could hardly be more gripping. The grand old Marxist of letters, Terry Eagleton, has strapped on his notched side-iron and called out Martin Amis, the fancy gunslinger of the chattering saloons.

Accusing Amis of Islamophobia for suggesting a clampdown on Muslims, he attacked the novelist’s late father Kingsley as “a racist, antisemitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals”.

To his critics he is “that dreadful Terry Eagleton”, as Prince Charles called him

His youthful job as an encyclopedia salesman, he once admitted, was his “earliest experience of peddling ideas to the masses, a project which was later to become my full-time occupation”.

Many famous names have felt his critical lash. He dismissed Richard Dawkins’s recent book The God Delusion as “a vulgar caricature of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince”.

Now Amis “and his ilk” are in his sights.

he can still spit with the best of them.