"I have read that you are broke," said Jonathan Coe. "Can I give you something? £5,000?"

Apparently, when the Independent was launched, the team was so highbrow that inter-office jokes circulating on the pre-email computer system were written in Latin. Now, although this is a very impressive anecdote, it is almost unbelievable; journalism, as the former Sunday Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson might once have said, is the perfect metier for a second-class brain. You don't have to know anything in very much detail, and even when you do, it rapidly gets replaced by the next day's story. That might explain why Tony Blair, who was once described as having a second-class brain with a first-class attitude, has such an acute understanding of the press. I might be dishonouring some very intellectual hacks, and if you are one, and are offended, I apologise.

However, after a riveting if brief dalliance among literary authors, agents and publishers at the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, I can confirm that certain types of writer inhabit a different stratosphere from us ephemeral scribblers. Topics discussed after Jonathan Coe's biography of B S Johnson scooped the £30,000 award were, variously: a) Has V S Naipaul lost form? b) Is there a writer other than Philip Roth who has had a similarly stellar late flowering in the novel form? and c) Can a teapot "bubble solipsistically"? This last question related to a quotation in a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, a publication that, it seemed, most of my drinking companions consume with as much gusto as we were knocking back the champagne at the Savoy's American Bar. These people were not merely expert critics of any book you care to mention; they were expert critics of the reviews of the books (in particular, a review of a certain recent novel by Ian McEwan, written by someone who clearly thought the bestseller was a bit of a stinker).

Mentally, the experience was like strolling up Helvellyn: bracing, memorable, but the sort of thing you don't do in slippers. And compared to the outlandish behaviour at the UK Press Awards, when Bob Geldof called a national newspaper editor a "twat" and was almost booed off stage, our literary crowd appears to breathe a different type of oxygen. Or drink a different type of alcohol. It certainly brought out the best post-award bonhomie I have ever encountered. "I have read that you are broke," Coe said to me. "And I have just trousered a £30,000 cheque. Can I give you something? £5,000, say?" You don't get that sort of chat at the Brits, I assure you.

Five minutes later, the saturnine literary agent Peter Strauss turned to me. "So," he said, in a surveying kind of manner that probably comes from being six foot five, "what is the best book you have read in the past three years?" What can one possibly say to such a salvo? You could go ironic and name something with a cover involving glittery writing, a stiletto heel and a handbag. You could go historic and murmur that, as you have just read Anna Karenina (again), it would be madness not to vote for Tolstoy. Or you could panic, think about this year's Booker winner, remember you haven't read it, consider this year's Orange winner, remember you haven't read that either, and go for the last thing you did at book club. Reader, which option do you think I went for? And what is the best book you have read in the past three years? Answers by e-mail, please.

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