style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">On the evening of Margaret Thatcher’s death, BBC2 broadcast a special edition of Newsnight. The novelist chosen to participate, via satellite from New York, was Martin Amis. With his absurdly suave voice, celebrity, frown and pout and his fondness for a fine phrase, Amis was an obvious choice to be literary London’s representative on the big night (even if he now lives on the other side of the Atlantic in Brooklyn).