The Nobel is coming up. The Guardian invites you to place a bet, while everyone else is still talking about that cheeky Swede who dared.

It’s easy to forget, but the award is not strictly speaking meant to go to the world’s best writer, but to “the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency”. If this has slipped anybody’s mind, don’t worry – it seems to have slipped the judges’ minds often enough. (A prize to anybody who can identify the idealistic tendencies in the work of William Golding or Ernest Hemingway. A luxury cruise to the void if you can spot Samuel Beckett’s.)

So perhaps Ladbrokes is right to leave it to their “novelty traders” to draw up the odds. As of this morning, their two frontrunners are Claudio Magris and Adonis. Philip Roth, strangely, has come in a bit from 7 to 5/1 – perhaps because people are hoping permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl has repented his scornful remarks about insular American authors – and that it’s not an idealistic year.