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Stendhal also hedged around instants of gentle surrender, as in The Charterhouse of Parma, when the year-long flirtation of Fabrizio, a prisoner, reaches fruition with Clélia, the pious daughter of his jailer. They have but moments in his cell and she is feeling unusually demonstrative, convinced he will be executed. She throws herself at the Italian soldier. “She was so lovely just then, gown slipping off her shoulders and in such a state of extreme passion, that Fabrizio could not resist an almost involuntary movement, which met with no resistance.”

Comedy is a fantastic source of good sex, not least because it doesn’t take itself too seriously — hence, petal-scattering and bath-drawing are kept to a bare minimum. Carl Hiaasen’s novels, in particular, make effective use of coke addicts, strippers, ex-prostitutes and flight attendants, all with a seam about to burst somewhere.

In A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole breaks frequently from comedy to interject descriptions of the sort of animal salaciousness the hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, loathes (and yet can not resist, as his cupboard of onanistic sex toys will attest). Early on we meet the haughty — and not a little bit stacked — Miss Lee. “She was a statuesque woman nearing middle age, her fine body covered with a black leather overcoat that glistened with mist.”

For this cruel sexpot he borrows a name from another famous woman whose pot was constantly set to simmer: Lana. You just know trouble is brewing.

But as the girls at school found with Clan of the Cave Bear, the most memorable erotic writing comes not from the usual sources but the unexpected ones. The sensual curves of everyday things, the unnoticed textures of beings we barely notice, their ways and means of reproduction. Many a biology text and not a few religious passages wound their way around my adolescent neurons and have since refused to budge, even when I need that grey matter for more important things, such as phone numbers. I particularly relish the description of Solanaceæ, the Nightshade family, in the Rev C. A. Johns’s Flowers of the Field (1905). Flowers are after all the reproductive organs of plants. The book was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and indeed, with anthers all a-burst and calyces deeply cleft, it could scarcely be more biblical.

“Calyx inferior, deeply cleft; corolla hypogynous, gamopetalous, plaited when in bud; stamens in one whorl, alternate with the petals; anthers bursting either by terminal pores or slits down their inner surfaces; ovary 2-chambered; style 1; sigma simple; fruit a 2-4-chambered capsule or nuculane; seeds numerous.”

From To His Mistress Going to Bed by John Donne

Off with those shoes: and then safely tread
In this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed . . .
By this these angels from an evil sprite
They set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O, my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned . . .
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my soul shall be.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.

From Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa — and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve a system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty — between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

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