The Booker Prize, whose thirtieth anniversary occurs this year and whose 1998 shortlist was announced a couple of days ago, has always been either dogged or enlivened by controversy, depending on your point of view.
The main charge against it is that it has been too elitist, an accusation brought up again this week by British Culture Secretary Chris Smith, who wants to see a new literary prize emphasising the enjoyment that fiction can offer.
He doesn't believe, for instance, that two recent winners, A.S. Byatt's Possession and Ben Okri's The Famished Road, are accessible to what he calls the ordinary reader (he must have forgotten about Keri Hulme's The Bone People, which can only have been truly accessible to Ms Hulme, and of whose proposed nomination as best book Joanna Lumley, one of that year's judges, said "Over my dead body!").
However, former judge Gillian Beer has no time for such arguments, pointing out the huge popularity of two other recent winners, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
And Penelope Fitzgerald, one of this year's judges, wearily says of the anti-Booker sniping: "It's the same every year. But this prize is for the best book, and that is not necessarily the same as the best read."
Shouldn't it be, though?
Christopher Nolan, whose book of childhood memoirs, Under the Eye of the Clock, won much acclaim (including the Whitbread Award) when it was published in 1987, has written his first novel, The Banyan Tree.
The severely disabled author, who is now thirty-three, first came to attention when Dam-burst of Dreams, a volume of poems and short stories transcribed with the aid of a stick strapped to his forehead, was published in 1981.
His forthcoming novel, to be published by Phoenix House next June, is set in the late 1980s on a rundown Irish farm and concerns a widow recalling her life.
The agent for Christopher Nolan is Giles Gordon, who works from Edinburgh for the prestigious firm of Curtis Brown and whose other authors include Peter Ackroyd, Sue Townsend and Allan Massie. Interviewed in the Bookseller a couple of weeks back, he was refreshingly forthright about the business he's in.
Asked what would make his job easier, he replied: "Accountants and sales people not having any say in what is published. They are nearly always wrong." What makes him laugh? "Editors giving the world the impression that they're seriously responsible for the quality of the books their companies publish."
Which is the worst book he's read? "There are so many, but I'd settle for anything by Anita Brookner." And any regrets? "That William Trevor, the contemporary master of the short story, turned me down for Pat Kavanagh twenty years or so ago."
Fay Weldon enraged a lot of women recently with her comments on sexual violence. What caused their anger was her revelation that when she was younger a man had tried to assault her, but she'd fended him off and didn't regard it as a big deal.
Her views on errant husbands, though, are a little less sanguine, if one can judge from her recent outburst in the New York Observer. Reviewing Catherine Texier's Breakup, a thinly fictionalised account of a man leaving his wife and children for his mistress, Ms Weldon felt that the author should have used other implements than a typewriter: "Take the scissors to his suits! To his balls with the knife! To his computer with the axe!"
Be warned, Bill - when your current spot of bother dies down, don't even think of running away with Monica, not while Fay's at large, anyway. BARRY UNSWORTH praised Peter Cunningham's first novel, Tapes of the River Delta, as "a subtle and perceptive study of the pains of adolescence" and an "eloquent meditation on recent Irish history", while Vincent Banville in this newspaper thought it "a highly exhilarating and engrossing work of fiction".
Cunningham's new novel, Consequences of the Heart (Harvill), is published next Thursday, and at 6.30pm that evening there's a launch party to celebrate it in Waterstone's of Dawson Street. All are welcome.
Meanwhile, this evening in the same venue, actor Richard E. Grant, whose recent diaries, With Nails, were praised for their barbed wit and their candour, will be reading from his first novel, By Design. If his screen persona is anything to go by, you can expect a degree of flamboyance in the reading, which starts at 7.30pm.