style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">Martin Amis, the writer Brits mysteriously love to hate, reportedly declared to an interviewer in France last year that his forthcoming novel about Britain’s “moral decrepitude” would be the “final insult” to his country as he quit these shores and decamped to Brooklyn. Amis later disavowed the interview as misattributed and poorly translated (“a mess”, he told The Observer); besides, one is wont to mouth off to journalists in foreign countries with a false sense of security that offhand remarks will never travel back home. Subsequently, Amis has been at pains to clarify that the new novel is no “V-sign” to England and that he has merely shifted to America for “family reasons”.