style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">In 2011 Philip Roth was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement. In the lead-up to an intimate celebratory dinner that he was due to attend with Roth in New York, Rick Gekoski, chairman of the judges, asked around to see if there was anything he shouldn’t raise in conversation with the thin-skinned and easily irritated novelist. The answer was the Nobel Prize in Literature.