“Midnight’s Children is still a wonderful, buoyantly self-delighted novel, where east and west – Sheherazade and Tristram Shandy – meet as they never met before. But it hardly needs this poll to tell us of its qualities or its influence. The point of the ‘Booker of Bookers’ vote was not this result, but the invitation to look back down the line of sometimes forgotten winners, to see which seem to have outlived the literary fashions that they might once have exemplified.”