“The Booker prize has, for much of its history, been anthrax for the average reader. Whether you stumbled dutifully out to buy Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient or Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, one thing you could be guaranteed of: you might come out of the experience feeling cleverer, or more high-toned, but you’re unlikely to have had much of an enjoyable time.

Furthermore, you are unlikely to have read anything contemporary, or that has anything to say about Britain today (though you might get a scent of Dublin or Glasgow). Rather as British art abandoned painting, for decades British writing abandoned story.

Plot, good characters and, God forbid, humour, have not only been largely absent from the list of Booker triumphs – they are positively reasons for exclusion, it seems sometimes. ” The Scotsman