11 NOVEMBER 1995, Page 38

Sir: I hesitate to take issue with so felici- tous

a diarist as Alan Clark, but isn't the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded for the body of an author's work rather than for a single book? The grand old men of Stockholm may have been prompted by The Old Man And The Sea to give the prize to Hemingway, but surely it was all his other works that got him Lit's biggest gong (Big Two Hearted River and other spare, peerless stories; The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell To Arms; Death In The After- noon; in addition to For Whom The Bell Tolls, his most commercially successful novel)?

Peter Smalley

55A Old Church Street, London SW3