A couple of years ago, Hartston did the following calculation during a grandmaster tournament in Spain: assuming that all the prize money on offer was divided simply between the grandmasters (and there were some powerful IMs scrapping for the loot as well), their average earnings worked out at between £2 and £3 an hour. The basic rate for the female industrial mushroom pickers in the North of England who demonstrated outside last year’s Booker Prize ceremony was £3.74 an hour.

Julian Barnes

Letters from London 1990-1995
(Picador, 1995), p.283