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Stephen Spender was, with his friends W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, one of the poets who came to define the 1930s and Weimar Germany.

W.L. Webb served as the Guardian’s literary editor for some three decades from the late 1950s, bringing a stellar roster of reviewers to the books pages, including William Golding and Salman Rushdie.

Ross Higgins was a Scottish bookseller and committee man who claimed he read 22 books each week so he could ‘give his customers the advice they so frequently ask for’.

Richard Hoggart was an academic who specialised in British popular culture. His evidence as an expert witness during the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960 was thought to be decisive.

Born in 1892, Rebecca West was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield and, in preparation for her role as a socialist feminist, took her adopted name from the spiky heroine in Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm.

David Holloway was one of three former chairs of judges (alongside Malcolm Bradbury and W.L. Webb) who in 1993 were asked to choose the ‘Booker of Bookers’. The trio plumped for Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Philip Toynbee was a journalist, public intellectual and novelist who, as a student communist in 1930s Oxford, was once beaten up by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.

Lady Antonia Fraser, historian and writer of detective novels, is, with Dame Rebecca West, one of only two people to have been a Booker Prize judge in consecutive years.

John Fowles was the author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman and managed to slip both postmodernism and existentialism into his widely read novels.

John Gross was an academic prodigy who became a pre-eminent man of letters. He was frequently - and quite probably accurately - described as ‘the best-read man in Britain’.