I see the BBC are planning an adaptation of Money by Martin Amis. I’ve always been a big Amis fan, though I prefer his first three novels to his more recent ones. And his memoir Experience is glorious.

I’ve noticed that during interviews – including one about Money - he often describes things as “sort of everything and nothing”. So when I got the chance to interview the great man some years back about his nuclear war fiction, I told friends I reckoned he would say his favourite phrase to me.

On the day, I opened the interview thus:

Me: “So, Martin, how difficult is it to write about nuclear war?”

Him: “It is difficult. Nuclear weapons – they’re sort of everything and nothing, aren’t they?”

Jackpot!