“I’m like Hugh Hefner,” Martin Amis says. “When he started out he was the hero of liberalism and then the culture changed. And then he became a villain of liberalism.”
Amis reclines on a cream sofa. Let me say right here that he is not wearing crimson pyjamas. He’s dressed in a pinstripe shirt and dark trousers and I expect that he is wearing underwear. But he is vaping: a blue light shines from the end of the pen as he inhales. And he has propped his head against a red cushion that calls to mind one of Hefner’s smoking jackets.
“Hefner started out in ’53, so 17 years before the sexual revolution. Then after the sexual revolution he became a pariah, and he didn’t