Expectations were confounded at the announcement of the Booker Prize 2005 in London on Monday night. The award of the £50,000 prize to the Irish novelist John Banville for his fourteenth novel, The Sea, was predicted by neither the pundits nor the bookmakers, who are now a powerful force in this particular literary jamboree.

So powerful, in fact, that one of the most influential literary critics in Britain is Graham Sharpe. You will not find Sharpe’s name on articles in literary periodicals, and his own publications include Odds, Sods and Racing Certs. He works for the bookmakers William Hill, and he has evolved for himself a special role in Britain’s most prominent literary event.