Untouchable swagger

I had dinner at the end of last month with an old friend, the writer Geoff Dyer, and we spent a good chunk of it talking about Martin Amis, who recently died in Florida at 73

- ANDREW ANTHONY

We took turns reminiscing about how important he was to us in earlier days, and how he symbolised a time and place London in the 1980s and 1990s - like no other writer. In fact, like no other person during that period.

It's hard to picture it now, but when we were in our 20s and early 30s, there was a novelist - a white male novelist - who was the very embodiment of bohemian cool, with his roll-up cigarettes, rich, slangy posh accent, and pouting poses for newspaper profile photoshoots, always bristling with wit and intelligence.

But contrary to his image as a very male writer who couldn't understand women, he didn't attract only fan-boy readers. My wife, who was dining with us, spoke of her own enjoyment of novels such as Money, which brilliantly satirised the new materialism of the 1980s, and confessed she had nurtured a minor obsession with him.