THERE ARE FEW SACRED COWS more sacred than Virginia Woolf. To criticise her adversely in literary circles is a little like animadverting on the character of Mohammed in Mecca — inadvisable. I have known literary types afraid openly to voice their dislike of both her person and her work, which means thereby that unstinting and uncritical praise goes by default.

And yet Woolf was a ferocious snob who expressed racist and antisemitic views, more than enough in anybody else to render her worthy of violent denunciation in these fair, well-spoken days.

If J.K. Rowling can be cancelled, to use the current inelegant term for secular excommunication, merely for stating a truth so obvious that until recently no one