So which Naomi do you think I am? The saga of Klein vs Wolf

Maureen O’Hara, the flame-haired ‘Queen of Technicolor’ celebrated for her on-screen chemistry with John Wayne, hated to be confused with Maureen O’Sullivan, who was Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan. But they were both Irish-born Hollywood actresses called Maureen, so it kept happening. I once heard John Sessions describe the time he met the octogenarian O’Hara. He prepared for the encounter by repeating to himself: ‘Don’t call her Maureen O’Sullivan.’ They got on famously until, inevitably, the wrong name slipped out. She took it ‘as badly as you can possibly imagine’.

Likewise, Naomi Klein hates it when people mix her up with Naomi Wolf – hates it so much, in fact, that she’s written a book about it. Since 1999, when Klein published No Logo, a razor-sharp evisceration of cool brands and their Third World sweatshops, she’s been mistaken for Wolf and vice versa. They’re both Jewish feminists with a knack for twisting the tail of corporate America. Wolf, eight years older than Klein, hit the intellectual jackpot with The Beauty Myth (1990), which blamed capitalism for, among other things, killing 150,000 anorexic young women.

Ironically, Wolf’s publicists didn’t have a problem advertising her own approximation to male ideas of beauty, while Klein’s artfully branded No Logo became, as she admits, ‘an accessory to be carried around and not read’. Neither Wolf nor Klein hit the jackpot again, but liberal commissioning editors had them both on speed dial and the public soon lost track of which Naomi was droning on about the genocidal logic of ‘late capitalism’.

Then, with the arrival of Covid, the comedy of prickly namesakes turned nasty. Wolf had always been prone to conspiracy theories. Now, writes Klein, she became ‘a relentless source of Covid-related misinformation’.