I know women who have admitted to me that that is why they read. And I suspect that most of the women still reading the latest lauded offerings do so only so that they are not left out in conversation at dinner parties. Few men read ‘serious’ fiction any more, although when I was young, half the readers were men. (Not to mention the clips from all-too-predictable, formulaic films.) This has me wondering and worrying whether literary fiction will also become irrelevant. This is the weekend of the Oscars – an event most of us now avoid, because of its tedious and hypocritical virtue-signalling and moralising. The Battle of the Amazons by Peter Paul Rubens, 1600