After the Seventies saw the Booker taking its tentative first steps, stumbling here and there, occasionally landing on a genuine classic but more often than not serving up curiosities rather than solid-gold genius, we venture into more solid ground in the Eighties.

There’s a sense here of more self-awareness, of the need for winners to feel “important” and make a statement of some kind. There are certainly more hits than misses, and even the latter are perhaps in some ways more interesting than those of the previous decade.

Keneally’s Holocaust novel, the basis of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, zooms in on the story of Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German industrialist who takes it upon himself to “save” thousands of Jews, initially by employing them in his enamelworks factory, Emalia, in Krakow (Poland), rather than having them sent to the horrors of Amon Goeth’s nearby Plaszow internment camp or - far worse - to almost certain extermination at Auschwitz. The later part of the novel documents the (even more incredible and shocking) transit of the Schindlerjuden away from the doomed Emalia camp and to a new factory near Schindler’s Sudeten/Czech hometown.