It was easy for the many people who didn’t approve of Brian Sewell to dismiss him as a comic figure because he spoke in that funny voice. Yet Sewell was in deadly earnest when he wrote about art. He was certainly as earnest as the little boy in the story who exclaimed, to the consternation of onlookers, that the emperor was wearing no clothes. So, almost alone of art critics, Sewell wrote that the respected icons of our 21st-century art world – the Tracey Emins, the Gilberts and the Georges – were not worthy of the name of art. That caused annoyance enough. But what really upset people and caused a group of VIPs from the art world to call for his dismissal from the Evening Standard, for which he wrote a weekly column, was the pronouncement that there were not, and never have been, any great women artists. There was no female Titian, no female Rembrandt. He could have added for good measure – and perhaps would have done, given the encouragement – that the same could be said of music: there was no woman Beethoven, no woman Mozart. What was most annoying about this observation about women artists – just as much, if not more so than his dismissal of Tracey Emin and co – was that it was perfectly obviously 100 per cent true. There was no female Rembrandt and there was no point in trying to find one who had been hitherto overlooked. Sewell’s point was annoying not so much as a piece of art criticism as an attack on the whole feminist movement, because it challenged its central tenet that there is no difference between men and women, that they both have the same abilities. It is the same idea that has now at long last persuaded the Church of England to appoint women bishops. And very appropriately the first female diocesan bishop, the Rt Rev Rachel Treweek, has revived the old argument about the gender of God. It is as if she has decided that, if a woman can be a Church of England bishop, why not God as well? At least, she argues, we should agree that God is neither male nor female. One of the many differences between men and women is that women are known to be more practical. So it is surprising to find Bishop Treweek proposing a reform that would cause not just a theological upheaval but also all kinds of more mundane difficulties. Taken to its