Martin Amis has achieved such celebrity as a stylish icon of his agegroup that the coverage in the media threatens to cloud the picture of his cleanedged originality as a master of the English sentence, of which he has reinvented every part while further focussing its melody and rhythm. Celebrated among his friends as one of the great talkers at the lunch table, he has rarely enjoyed talking on television, which he finds intolerably artificial. But when he talks in my library, with a drink and a rollup to hand, it's a different matter.