I've been thinking recently about the arrogance of extrapolation. Of imagining that your own personal experiences are so important, so unique, that they must be extrapolated from and fashioned into a lesson, even a manual, for everyone else to follow. The memoir-as-manual — it's the new publishing craze. We've had Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman, which, as suggested by its Victorian-style manual-for-women title, takes as its starting the point the idea that Ms Moran's eccentric girlhood under self-impoverished bohemian parents in Wolverhampton (commentators make the mistake of calling this a working-class upbringing) contains profound insights for the entirety of womankind. We've had Afua Hirsch's Brit-ish, in which Ms Hirsch's eye-wateringly privileged upbringing in Wimbledon, and the fact she once got funny looks when she went into a shop, is extrapolated from and turned into a missive on Britain's allegedly dysfunctional relationship with race.

And we have Robert Webb's How Not to be a Boy. The title itself drips with this arrogance of extrapolation. Webb, a comic writer, best known as one of the stars of Peep Show alongside David Mitchell, thinks his childhood experiences have endowed him with a special insight into the predicament of men, the toxic nature of masculinity, and the necessity for 50 per cent of the population to change their ways if they want to survive. He really says this. His aim with this memoir is no less than to 'extend that awareness [he means the gender-awareness that he has already achieved] to the half of the population who might still be under the impression that gender conditioning didn't happen to them because they have a Y chromosome'. It's almost religious.