Losing your heart — or your nose

If a car is travelling behind a tractor for five miles on a narrow road, and at last the tractor turns off down a side street, often you will see that car, from its driver’s pent-up frustration, suddenly shoot forward, trashing the speed limit.

Something similar happened to writing about sex after the Lady Chatterley case of the early 1960s and the subsequent relaxation of censorship. Novelists felt that, because they could now cram their books full of eroticism, they must. Eventually things settled down and the writers just brought in sex where, as they say, the plot required it — where poor Thomas Hardy would have liked to deploy it, and nearly did.

About ten years later, raging feminism simmered down in much the same way. There was the Women’s Lib movement of the early Seventies — Germaine Greer and all that; then supervened the years of what were sneeringly referred to as ‘Wimmin’s Studies’.