Diary – 29 June 2017

To Fortnum & Mason last week on the hottest evening of the year to present the Desmond Elliott Prize for this year’s best first novel, which I helped judge. I had to acknowledge the weather in my speech: I was perspiring, ahem, liberally. Sweating like a… what? The traditional comparator is now definitely verboten. Like Keith Vaz before a select committee? Like Boris in an Eddie Mair interview? Too niche. I went for ‘like a British Brexit negotiator’ and got a gratifying laugh. They won’t be laughing two years from now.

We had two superb runners-up in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You and Kit de Waal’s My Name Is Leon. But the prize went finally to Francis Spufford’s almost indecently clever and entertaining Golden Hill, set in 18th-century New York and described as ‘the best 18th-century novel since the 18th century’. A bizarre thing in the book is how New York, then, was a tiny village on the lower tip of Manhattan with vast dark forest all points north.