Cal Nathan, owner of the New York Fun Factory, an event planner in Hicksville, N.Y. (nyfunfactory.com), said that he, too, has witnessed an uptick in the number of couples using out-of-the-box gimmicks like stilt walkers, celebrity look-alikes, photo booths and minicasinos to make their weddings stand out.

You expect me to clean up all this mess for you? Do me a favour.

But to learn to love manhood, sooner or later you have to learn to jerk off in one particular way, to the exclusion of some other possible ways.

This gift for taking the urgent issues of the day and presenting them as detective stories that race past like footfalls down an alleyway has made Pamuk the best-selling writer in the history of his native Turkey and the deserving winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, at the unvenerable age of 54.