Amos Oz and Philip Roth, both wrongly fancied for this year’s Nobel Prize, are up for another literary award, which, alas, is not one that they are likely to wish to add to the trophy store. They have been shortlisted by the Literary Review for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award, set up to mock dubious descriptions of erotic activity.

Roth has been nominated for a scene in The Humbling, a tale of an ageing actor and a lesbian, while Oz for a novelist’s reveries about a waitress in Rhyming Life with Death.

I shall spare you further detail.