The Texan model Jerry Hall, who keeps James Joyce's Dubliners by her bed, set out yesterday to prove she is a worthy choice to judge a major literary prize.
The decision to pick Ms Hall as a Whitbread Prize judge has provoked a venomous literary debate, with the organisers of the Booker Prize calling it a severe case of "dumbing down".
"Where do you go after this? Do you get a Spice Girl?" asked the Booker Prize administrator, Mr Martyn Goff.
Ms Hall, famed as the leggy, long-suffering ex-partner of philandering Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, fought back at the "dumb blonde" accusations by drawing up a list of her favourite books.
Appropriately, the elegant model who once referred to herself as "pure pussycat", picked Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos as her top read.
Ms Hall says she loves reading to her four children and has in the past listed Flaubert, Zola, Voltaire and Jane Austen among her favourite books at bedtime.
Britain's poet laureate, Andrew Motion, wholeheartedly approved of her list. "Good for her. How silly it would be for us to turn our noses up at her," he said.
Dr Lisa Jardine, a professor of Renaissance studies, said: "I take my hat off to Jerry Hall yet again. She is much more than a model."
The best-selling author Robert Harris, who will be ploughing through the Whitbread shortlist with Ms Hall to find the book of the year, snorted his disapproval of Mr Goff's outburst.
"I think he has made an ass of himself - a prize ass in fact," Mr Harris said, fiercely defending the populist Whitbread against the more highbrow Booker.
Among the other Whitbread judges are the comedienne Sandi Toksvig, who has a first-class Cambridge degree, the actress Imogen Stubbs, who boasts a double first from Oxford and the Conservative MP Ms Ann Widdecombe.
Ms Widdecombe was equally scathing about the literary storm in a teacup. "So great is the intellectual snobbery of the literary establishment," she said, "that it cannot imagine anyone having a brain and appealing to millions of ordinary people at the same time."