If the authors of this book sound like a firm of estate agents, it's because they have virtuously repressed their first names as a protest against gender stereotyping. But one wonders if they have failed to carry this resistance far enough. There are, after all, several million Ewens knocking around the globe, and this particular pair might fear that their unique personalities are threatened by a blandly generic term. Perhaps the best strategy would be to vary one's surname from day to day to avoid the indignity of being labelled.

LRB 30 November 2006 | PDF Download