Afternoon:
14°c
Judging the Samuel Johnson Prize began as an over-enthusiastic book club - each of us had 40 books to read in three months - and ended in personal transformation.
The winning book turned out to be what we first tentatively described as a "strange story about whales".
Why choose Philip Hoare's Leviathan from a long list that included authors such as Simon Schama and Adam Nicolson and subjects as appealing as Casanova and Shakespeare and Pompeii?
We had one scientist on the panel of five - Dr Mark Lythgoe, from University College London - yet the short-list was weighted by science-based books: Bad Science by Ben Goldacre; The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes; Quantum; Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar. Plus some biology in Leviathan and botany in Lost City of Z.
In the green room before the awards yesterday, Lythgoe was still protesting against the refusal of arts graduates to embrace science.
He chuckled over Ben Goldacre's thesis that the media is stuffed with art bias so wilfully restricts science coverage to mad nutritional theories and PR stunts.
Goldacre was a slightly sore point so far as I was concerned. I regarded it as a series of clever columns rather than a narrative and was disappointed not to have got Alexander Waugh's merry biography of the suicidal Wittgenstein family into the top six.
So what made this year's great writers turn to science for inspiration and what does it say about our times?
These books are untouched by daily anxiety or cynicism. The public conversation of the past few months has been squabbling politicians and their expenses.
So imagine one's soaring spirits to read of Einstein and Bohr discussing, heatedly, night after night, the composition of the universe. As Einstein put it: "I want to know how God created this world. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details."
The prevailing theme of the shortlist was not science in an academic form but the heroic human quest of discovery.
In the case of the wonderful Lost City of Z, by David Grann, this takes the literal form of a journey into the heart of the Amazon to find a hidden city and untangle a mystery.
In Quantum, it is a challenge to the master of the universe. Even Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed, ostensibly about the causes of the Great Depression, turns out to be a heroic tragedy about the men trying to control it.
At the award ceremony last night, I spoke to Richard Holmes about his book, the Age of Wonder. He had come within a spit of winning and we had argued between his book and Leviathan - each changing our positions within the discussion - for an entire afternoon.
Holmes said that his inspiration was the dreams of youth. His authority on the Romantic poets had led him to the romantic scientists of the 18th century.
He had been entranced by Coleridge's notion of a shared colony of poets and scientists to discuss "the stuff of dreams". It was, said Holmes, all about hope.
"Keep true to the dreams of your youth" was the mantra of the cursed Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick and one of many haunting characters in Philip Hoare's book, Leviathan.
Whales are not so much the subject as the obsession. Man, whale, life, death. A sea monster that embodies the origins of the earth. After reading this book I dreamed of sperm whales and awoke with tears on my cheeks.
Life is grand and mysterious and mankind is plucky. This is the message of this year's Samuel Johnson Prize.
To read prizewinner Philip Hoare's Evening Standard article on whales click here
