“By the end of his career Philip Roth was considered to be the last of the postwar American literary giants left standing,” said The Times obituary this week. So if you don’t have an opinion on the great man and his works, you really need to conjure one up sharpish. Nobody expects you to read all the fruit of more than half a century of his writing, so if you are new to him here are the five novels you could start with. They give a sense of his style, ambition and outlook.

The Human Stain (2000)

This is the story of the fall of Coleman Silk, a retired classics professor who is accused of racism after he describes two absent students as “spooks”. His