Zut alors. So Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature. He exploded on the literary world with Desert, his novel about a lost culture in the North African desert. Some prefer his later nouveaux romans, such as this year's Ritournelle de la faim. Macaulay said that every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma. But even his swot of a schoolboy may not be familiar with all Le Clézio's novels. However, the Nobel prize committee commends him for his “sensual ecstasy”.

A fierce argument about the prize is being conducted in the United States. One of the Swedish judges has attacked Americans for being too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. He describes the bookmanism of the United States as isolated and insular. “They don't translate enough, and they don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” Americans reply with patronising pity for the ignorance of the Swede.

In books, one man's meat is another woman's poisson. Compare and contrast the following British writers: at the one inkstand, Harold Pinter, Galsworthy, Russell and Winston Churchill; and, on the other keyboard, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and P.G. Wodehouse. All the first team were awarded the Nobel prize. None of the second team was. Macaulay's irritatingly know-all schoolboy might not agree that all the former were “better writers”. Contrary to the misapprehension of the competitive, the Nobel prize is not the Olympic Games of scribbling. Alfred Nobel wanted it to go to “the most outstanding work (oeuvre) of an idealistic tendency”.

Who dares to argue that Le Clézio has not deserved it?