There is form for the Booker being awarded to first-rate writers for second-rate work.
Like many first-rate writers of his generation, he was intoxicated most of the day, every day.
It has been for many years+the only recognized international showcase for first-rate writers from all over the Commonwealth.
Like all truly first-rate writers, he mapped out his own country with its own distinctive topography.
"Literary fiction" in its familiar formats has slumped deep into recession as first-rate writers struggle to keep a toehold in a hostile marketplace.
The thing about Florida crime writing isn't just that there's a lot of it; it's that, as Glassman points out in that collection, there are few first-rate writers in Florida who aren't crime writers.
He said that the magazine at the time used high-quality photography and first-rate writers who might have worked in any field, but chose to write about cars.
James Lasdun and Edward St Aubyn are also first-rate writers who have yet to win honours they deserve, while one hopes that Howard Jacobson will not be left growling again from the sidelines.
"All right, then!" As with all first-rate writers, the bite, and even occasional bluster, was covering up something, and in Bob's case this was an enormous vulnerability: to experience, to people, to art.
In one such memo-to-self, he had asked, "Why am I not writing this book faster?" And he had answered, using the second person: "You're demonstrating concern for readers in not burdening them with bad writing.... There's so much bad writing out there, why add to it?" Yes? "The bookshelves of America are lined with the second-rate work of first-rate writers".
Despite having first-rate writers and the occasional agenda-setting scoop - it was political editor Martin Bright who revealed on his NS blog that a terrorist suspect was among the foreign ex-prisoners released by the Home Office, thereby reportedly ending Charles Clarke's tenure as home secretary - the magazine has a lingering image problem to overcome.
