The world of literary prizes is such a vexed and vexatious one, and having rarely been listed for any myself, I may have a jaundiced view of their value. The Nobel is, due to its sheer pecuniary value, supposedly the Big One, the Everest of achievement and the Moby Dick that has certain Booker winners checking their mobiles every year to see if they have won.

But does any reader pick a novel because its author has won the Nobel? The old saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee so often comes to mind that those of us who love reading are often grateful to prizes for making clear what or who is largely tedious and unreadable.

Let us not forget that the Nobel rewarded Bob Dylan, who, though a revered singer-songwriter, is literature only to the wilder followers of Professor Christopher Ricks.

What this absurd scandal - involving not a judge but the husband of a judge - obscures is that, although there are outstanding novelists, from Margaret Atwood to Philip Pullman, there is no great genius of literature currently writing in English. Not one.

I well remember the gloom that would descend on the board of the Society of Authors when, every year, we had to put forward a British author for consideration and could only come up with Harold Pinter.