In its 24th year, the Literary Review's Bad Sex In Fiction Awards, held this week at the In and Out Club (get it?) in St James’s, continues to do what it says on the tin. That is to name and shame the producers of “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”.

Quite right too. Certainly, Wednesday's winner, the Italian Erri De Luca, winner of the 2013 winner of the European Prize for Literature, had it coming (as it were) for a scene between a young man and an older siren in his Neapolitan novel, The Day Before Happiness.

“My p**k was a plank stuck to her stomach. With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her. She opened her legs, pulled up her dress and, holding my hips over her, pushed my p**k against her opening. I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.”

Yet both before and during the event, I heard numerous people decry the awards as a tired, depressing and sneering exercise in “no sex we’re British”-ness. One remarked that both the sneering and the prudery made for a claustrophobic infantilism of peculiarly national hue.