9. George Steiner. In his recent publication My Unread Books (Faber), Professor Steiner unearthed at least a dozen of his own works that, for one reason or another, no one has quite got round to reading yet. In one of them, he devotes 600 pages to his discovery that the words for “mantelpiece” and “moribund” are the same in Swahili, and in another he relates his most recent sexual conquests in a dialect spoken only in a three-acre area of Upper Moldavia.

10. Richard Dawkins. Such was the force of Dawkins’s recent arguments for atheism that God emailed our pollsters to admit that even He was beginning to doubt His own existence. On the other hand, publishing insiders say that Dawkins’s new book puts forward the possibility of a previously overlooked omniscient deity. The Outside Chance: It Might Be Me is due out in October.