Well, with the award of the 2007 Literature Nobel, there’ll be smiles all round one group of Oxford scholars today – the scholars in question being the piles of money wagered on it, the smiles on the Ladbrokes directors dancing round it.

To the best of my memory (the odds are now down), Doris Lessing, the author of The Golden Notebook, wasn’t even offered in the field.

It’s a surprise to many, since another British author – Harold Pinter – got the prize only a couple of years ago, and with the exception of Coetzee in 2003, the prize hasn’t gone outside Europe (it’s gone to a couple of non-Europeans resident there) since Kenzabura Oe in 1994.

For all that, Lessing is a good choice. Her prose is the opposite of elegant – if Philip Roth’s writing is baggy and commonplace, Lessing’s stories often feel like an overstuffed mattress, damp, on a landfill. But as John Updike once remarked that’s part of the force of it – she communicates a sense that what she’s talking about is of such importance that actual style would be some sort of betrayal of the material.

The Academy cited her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

The works that would have swung it for her would be her bizarre series of science-fiction stories that use space opera to reflect on gender relations on earth, and above all the epic 1962 Golden Notebook, which pulled apart the form of the realist novel, female eunuchry avant la lettre, private and public politics, the works.

Reaction has been mixed. Harold Bloom has called it “pure political correctness”. If it is, it’s been a long time coming, because Lessing has become notorious in recent years for attacks on feminism, and for arguing that men are getting a rougher deal out of contemporary life than women used to get. A former Communist – a half-century ago – she’s been pretty scathing about the mix of motives that went into revolutionary leftism.

The Bloomberg site wrote it up as “a snub for Philip Roth”. That’s right America, it’s all about you.

Mind you I do feel for Les Murray, though it’s kinda funny as well. Having spent decades telling us that feminism is just an extension of what cruel teenage girls did to him at school, in the year he was close to favourite, he loses the prize to the inspiration for two generations of them. Maybe someone from the Swedish Academy will go to Bunyah and shoot his dog, just as the kiss of the whip.

Ah well, Les, keep an eye on the cholesterol and hang in there. Judging from Roth’s oeuvre, he’s bound to Billy Snedden some time in the next 12 months. And then it’s just wogs and frogs.