1. Lit-crit is inherently unsexy. The piece everyone's talking about this week is Kathryn Hughes's slashing-claw diatribe against fellow-biographer, Amanda Foreman. Why is it so front-page newsworthy? Because it comes trailing a picture of the delectable Amanda in the altogether. Generally, however, lit-crit (unlike sport, or film, or theatre, or dance) is testosterone poor. You can sex up every other section of the paper, but seldom, if ever, the literary pages. And sexy is the flavour of our times.