St. Julian of Norwich was a woman. So was George Eliot and so is Princess Michael of Kent. Dominique de Villepin, however, is a man, as is Dominique-nique-nique in that song. Perhaps most Dominiques are men. I don't know. Perfectly coiffed hair, pretty clothes or a handbag tells you only that they are French.

Gareth Pierce, the dozy bint lawyer who defended jihadist Mozzam Begg is a woman. Can there be a sillier name for a woman than Gareth? For sure: Lionel. As in Lionel Shriver, the novelist. I only just found out she was a woman. What a daft name. Apparently, she's really a Margaret. Ann. Now I understand a writer wanting a gender-neutral name like A. S. Byatt or J. K. Rowling. If the latter had used "Joanne", many boys would have dismissed her novels as "girly". And I certainly understand why women used male pseudonyms in the days of George Eliot. I could even understand if Margaret Ann were a Jackie or a Lesley or a Hilary, or a plain Tom, Dick or Harry. But Lionel? It's as bad as Tarquin. Apparently her/his/its novel isn't up to much: From The Times:

There is a lot of diarrhoea in Lionel Shriver’s ninth novel, not all of it related to the plot. The improbably named Shep Knacker is planning to retire from New York to Pemba, an island near Zanzibar, when his wife Glynis develops peritoneal mesothelioma, an uncommon form of cancer. Meanwhile, his best friend Jackson has had to join his wife Carol in coping with their daughter Flicka’s familial dysautonomia, an even rarer and more humiliating illness. We hear plenty about enemas and bleeding anuses as Shriver tries to confront the cost of keeping dying people alive.

Her supporting cast are stick figures for use in polemics on contemporary America, trapped within her distressingly poor prose. She wants us to believe in Shep’s pious father, his introverted son, his egomaniacal sister and his greedy boss, but they remain resolutely implausible. There are unconvincing gestures towards Shep’s and Jackson’s inner lives. Jackson has a catastrophic extension to his “fifth appendage” because there were “limits to his own disaffection with the phallus of conventional proportions”. Shep dreams of a house with a rotten wooden frame — he renovates buildings and his wife has cancer, you see. Passages like these restate characters’ dilemmas without illuminating them.

Shep? That was the dog on Blue Peter. And Knacker? She's having a laugh, surely? Sadly, I don't think so - her choice of names suggests she lacks a sense of the ridiculous.