Auberon Waugh

Woe be Unto Thee, O Moab!

My December sermon from the pulpit, as a few people may remember, ended with a paean of praise and thanks to Stephen Fry, who kindly agreed to present the prizes at the Literary Review’s annual award for Bad Sex in Fiction – won this year by Nicholas Royle, whose original and stimulating novel The Matter of the Heart (Abacus £9.99) included the glorious sentence: ‘Yasmin grinned and writhed on the bed, arching her back, making a noise somewhere between a beached seal and a police siren.’

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