How well written are Rand's novels? Indeed, how far are they novels? Are they simply vehicles for what her detractors would dismiss as propaganda, and her supporters as philosophy? When one considers some of the aperçus of Atlas Shrugged, they owe nothing to subtlety and much to the crusading vigour of the ideologue. "The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force." Or this: "No rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality - to think, to work and to keep the results - which means: the right of property." Or this: "There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value." Or this: "A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality." Or this: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

Eventually, we get to the root of Rand's philosophy - objectivism, something for which she was ridiculed when she first expounded it (and accused of being a Nazi for espousing, which missed the point, both about her hatred of state intervention and the fact that she was Jewish): "I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

The vilification she endured from the time of Atlas Shrugged, when she made the self-conscious leap from being a novelist to being a philosopher, was perhaps made worse by the fact that she placed so much emphasis on money. For her, the sign of the dollar was the sign of freedom, of which individuality and capitalism were essential component parts. When she died in 1982 the only floral tribute permitted at her funeral was a wreath in the shape of a dollar sign. "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other." I cannot source the quotation, but she is also reputed to have said at one point: "The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time." There are many conservatives in America today who feel similarly, and who are affected by one of Roark's aphorisms in The Fountainhead: "The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it."