Also we all bring to the judging process our own unconscious preferences and dislikes perhaps not always so unconscious

Also, we all bring to the judging process our own unconscious preferences and dislikes, perhaps not always so unconscious, which may screen out our experimenting with something very different. We may be scared to challenge our own notions of what literary excellence is. These are, of course, inflected by what’s formed us as readers Enter issues of gender, race and class. Reactionary to pretend they don’t exist.I raised the question of why only a third of novels submitted by publishers were by women. When did you last see a Booker shortlist dominated by women’s novels? You didn’t. Women go on being the exceptions who prove the old-fashioned rule that male-defined genius tends, surprise surprise, to be male. Just as ignorant arts journalists continually peddle the notion that all our best writers are male (neat sexist niche reserved for Beryl Bainbridge as bridesmaid), just as commentators this year, pre-longlist, boringly talked of their hopes for a war between the Titans of Rushdie and Hornby, so I thought some of us on the panel had to dismantle some cultural prejudices about novels coming from Africa and India.

Did we really know how to read them well?Many of the novels we admired concerned war. On one level this is hardly surprising, given that the world is currently torn apart by war as seemingly never before. On another, it was intriguing that the wars explored were not always contemporary ones. This must have something to do with the question children classically ask their parents: where did I come from? What made me? They may receive answers to do with storks, or God, or sex. The child grown into an adult hungers for additional information, for responses that touch on the shaping powers of culture and history.

She wants to learn who her parents were before they had children She receives their memories as treasures. She may find they inspire a novel.Several novelists summoned the Second World War from the perspective of the ordinary people who lived, fought and died in it. We’ve had the officers’ perspective, the upper-class perspective, for so long; it’s a huge relief to hear from the troops, transformed from gallant, wisecracking Tommies into complex flesh-and-blood beings with intellects and souls. Derek Beaven produced a beautiful meditation on the moral and sexual dilemmas thrown up by war. If the Invader Comes (Fourth Estate £15.99) moves between Malaysia and East London, describes the love affair between Vic Warren and Clarice Pike, Vic’s difficulties with his troubled wife Phyllis, his manipulation and bullying by her criminal friends, his subsequent punishment and imprisonment, his anguished love for his small son Jack.