“The truth is that men will not, on the whole, read books written by women,” according to a new report by British academics Lisa Jardine and Anne Watkins. As Sinclair McKay reports in a Daily Telegraph story, Alarmingly, their survey covered about 100 writers, academics and critics — ie, people who have a vested interest in not looking like the idiot who has failed to read the great novel.” Says McKay, “This is a social as much as a literary question. If the best fiction is about searingly truthful exploration of the inner recesses of the human heart, then it is obvious that your average chap is going to go nowhere near it. We get enough of that at home.”