In 2013, a time when capitalism ruled the world, the former British Library precinct within the British Museum − where Karl Marx once spent many productive years calculating this outcome − hosted an exhibition of the earliest evidence of human imagination. Ice Age Art assembled a cornucopia of figurative objets d'art created up to 40,000 years ago (or more), depicting humans and the other animals with whom they shared space.

The audience was greeted by voluptuous fecundity: ripe, round female figures, with reindeers in flight, fish, birds, mammoths, lions, flutes, fish hooks, needles, and an occasional male. I trust that Marx would have been awed.

T.J. Clark, a distinguished art critic, was not so much awed as affronted by the sheer, surprising woman-ness of this universe. Writing in the London Review of Books he catches himself out for assuming that the image-makers were men, and concedes the prevailing inference that it is "more likely" that the creators were women. He speculates on pregnancy not as the moment when women's bodies are home to another, but as a kind of alienation, "a body becoming other to itself." It is also "fearful, astonishing, ominous", he mutters, and the figurines "fat, fat, fat". He acknowledges what many of his readers, no doubt, will have already guessed: "I know I am lost." No willies, few weapons, no bodies whose raison d'être is to be desired.