While I was on holiday the other week I came across an article about VS Naipaul’s recent comments about women writers. That he had the infinite gall to say that writing by women is ‘unequal’ to him is bad enough, but that he picked on Jane Austen in particular was sure to get my goat.

But thanks to the Guardian, you can also see in practice what utter tosh (to use one of Mr Naipaul’s expressions) is the idea that you can guess the gender of a writer from a paragraph or two. Check out their male / female writers quiz, of which I only got two out of ten correct.

TRY THE NAIPAUL TEST HERE

Lesley Crooks, Sales & Digital Manager