A judge of this year’s Booker Prize reflects on the practicalities of trying to find the best book published this year. “Theoretically, the chance to read 100 of Britain and the Commonwealth’s finest at the rate of three a day (I am a fast reader and I resolved not to hang about with this particular task) ought to prompt all kinds of informed judgments about the state of British fiction here in the foothills of the 21st century. In fact it does nothing of the sort.”