Amis has been trashing England for years. In much of his fiction, England is a land of cheats, pimps, liars, murderers, gangsters, slackers, drunks and dopes. It's Big Mal's world, in an Amis short story published in The New Yorker in 1996 and reprinted in Heavy Water. The short story was titled "State of England":

He was leaving early, and there on the steps was the usual shower of chauffeurs and minicabbies, hookers, hustlers, ponces, tricks, twanks, mugs and marks, and, as Mal jovially shouldered his way through, a small shape came close, saying breathily, dry-mouthed, Hold that, mate .... Suddenly Mal was backing off fast in an attempt to get a good look at himself: at the blade in his gut and the blood following the pleats of his soiled white shirt. He thought, What's all this you hear about getting stabbed not hurting? Comes later, doesn't it — the pain? No, mate: it comes now. Like a great paper cut to the heart. Mal's belly, his proud, placid belly, was abruptly the scene of hysterical rearrangements. And he felt the need to speak, before he fell.

What's literature about? What's it for? What are writers up to at their desks, or in the kitchen watching the kettle? These are difficult questions. George Orwell wondered if the "demon" that drove writers was "simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention". What literature is not about is pandering to the poor tastes of dead bores; bores who try to take down a talented writer because they don't have any talent of their own. Nor is it about writers pitching platitudes at the public, or twisting their talents to suit the times. Good writers, I suspect, sit at desks chasing what Zadie Smith beautifully calls "the truth of your own conception". They do not temper their writing to please people who couldn't spot talented prose if pyrotechnics burst from the page to point it out to them.

The voice of conscience in The Pregnant Widow says that sex has two unique characteristics: "It is indescribable. And it peoples the world. We shouldn't find it surprising, then, that it is much on everyone's mind." You can't describe real literary talent either. You simply sense it in the shape and sound of the prose, or you don't. And while literary talent doesn't do anything as grand as peopling the world, it is the only thing that time gives a damn about when it ranks the world's writers. We shouldn't find it surprising, then, that the writers who've got talent right now are much on the minds of the writers who don't.

You can't prove why next century's readers are more likely to seek out Martin Amis's words than they are to seek out the dead bores' words. If they do seek out the bores' words, they may marvel that so much sour ink was spat at a writer who refused to temper his speech and his writing for anyone. They may ask why the bores wasted their time, and their readers' time, bashing a writer who had interesting things to say about how we lived back then, and who wrote it down with true style. They may also ask why we listened to so many words from a person named Katie Price; a person who left nothing of any value to anyone, and who had nothing interesting to say even in her own time. I think Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism and The Flight of the Intellectuals, is asking the right questions in our time: "Who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure?"