In Defence of Men

I’ve been thinking recently about the arrogance of extrapolation. Of imagining that your own personal experiences are so important, so unique, that they must be extrapolated from and fashioned into a lesson, even a manual, for everyone else to follow. The memoir-as-manual — it’s the new publishing craze. We’ve had Caitlin Moran’s How To Be a Woman, which, as suggested by its Victorian-style manual-for-women title, takes as its starting the point the idea that Ms Moran’s eccentric girlhood und...