Julian Barnes

His lack of Booker laurels is by no means through lack of experience however. Following a degree at Oxford, Barnes worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, before exercising his creative muscles as a literary editor and film critic.

And he is no stranger to literary controversy either. His wife is literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who used to be agent to his one-time friend Martin Amis, with whom Barnes had something of a public spat after Amis changed agents.

On the show, Barnes discusses his latest book, Arthur and George, an account of a famous, but now forgotten miscarriage of justice which took place in Victorian England which Barnes likens to "an English version of the Dreyfus case".

As the new century begins, George Edalji - the mixed-race son of a Staffordshire vicar (his mother is Scottish and his father is Indian) who became a lawyer specialising in railway law - and Arthur Conan Doyle are drawn together as the result of a series of events which made sensational headlines at the time as 'The Great Wyrley Outrages'.

Farm livestock were found mysteriously mutilated in Staffordhire, and the finger of suspicion was pointed at George, in spite of it being highly unlikely that he could have committed the crimes. The already-successful author Arthur Conan Doyle was roused to become George's champion and expose the impending miscarriage of justice, and this Barnes' study is a unique evocation of the unexpected relationship between these two intellectual men.

Barnes says of it: "it's a contemporary novel that just happens to be set a hundred years ago….It has a strong racial element - the police were clearly prejudiced. It's about what we think and what we can prove - it also has a spiritual dimension".

Arthur & George is priced £7.99, and is available from all good bookshops now.