Rod Liddle vs Mary Beard – the re-match. Tune in tonight to Any Questions

Last year, Rod Liddle waded into the Mary Beard ‘misogyny’ row. You may recall that Beard appeared on Question Time, and then complained about the ‘misogynistic’ abuse she received on Twitter when people disagreed with her. ‘The misogyny here is truly gob-smacking,’ whined Prof Beard. The abuse would be ‘quite enough to put many women off appearing in public’.

Nonsense, said Rod. ‘It is nothing to do with misogyny – it is just what people reach for when they, perhaps temporarily, hate someone’. Beard had, Rod said, managed to make ‘what can be politely described as an utter fool of herself’. Rod detailed the insults she suffered in consequence: some were ‘accurate refutations of her vacuous argument’, others were ‘expressions of annoyance at her middle-class, metropolitan insouciance’ and others ‘ridiculed her appearance’. The last was most important, Rod said, because Mary only ends up on TV because of the way she looks:

‘They think she looks like a loony.