Books & Poetry

See London's 30 most erotic writers

London has always been a palace of sexual varieties: both the hub of Britain’s sex trade and the chamber in which, since the advent of the printed word, debates about liberty, repression and obscenity have raged and (occasionally) been resolved. It’s the country’s erotic centre – its G-spot, if you will. Which is why Time Out decided it was high time to consider the ways in which sex has been celebrated by London writers down the centuries.

Our Top 30 chart of London’s rudest writers collects, in a single heaving but well-ventilated space, the authors we feel have contributed the most to our understanding of the city’s complex sexual psychology. What do we mean by ‘rude’? Boldly transgressive as well as pornographic (after all, anyone can be pornographic), seductive and titillating as well as obscene and, always, well written.

One of the functions of nostalgia is to purge the past of elements that don’t chime with our limited sense of how people once lived. So it’s salutary, and oddly bracing, to be reminded that dildos were around in the sixteenth century (Thomas Nashe) and that ‘cunt’ (okay, ‘queynte’) was a slang term for female genitalia in Chaucer’s day.

But don’t just take our word for it. Our saucy scribblers come endorsed by some of London’s finest contemporary writers, including Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Will Self and Jilly Cooper.

So put down your whip, unbuckle that gimp mask and let’s begin…

1 Walter, aka Henry Spencer Ashbee
2 Alan Hollinghurst
3 Kenneth Tynan
4 Algeron Charles Swinburne
5 Thomas Nashe
6 John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
7 William Shakespeare
8 Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Gerald Kersh
10 John Cleland

11 Havelock Ellis
12 Hanif Kureishi
13 Sigmund Freud
14 Henry Fielding
15 James Boswell
16 William Wycherley
17 Daniel Defoe
18 Mark Ravenhill
19 Geoff Nicholson
20 Maxim Jakubowski

21 Oscar Moore
23 Sebastian Horsley
24 Molly Parkin
25 Stewart Home
26 Mary Robinson
27 Patrick Marber
28 JG Ballard
29 Lady Caroline Lamb
30 Anthony Neilson

Thanks to Jane Edwardes, Rachel Halliburton, Nina Caplan, Jonathan Derbyshire. Portraits Simian Coates and Rob Greig

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30 Anthony Neilson
Playwright Neilson was born in Scotland in (it’s thought) 1967. In his best-known play, ‘The Censor’, a porn actress confronts the censor who is sitting in judgement on her latest film.

In his own words
Fontaine ‘MILKY MAMAS – what’s that?’
Censor ‘It’s pregnant women having sex with each other.’
Fontaine ‘[Genuinely] That’s nice…’ (‘The Censor’)

Lisa Goldman (artistic director, Soho Theatre)
‘Anthony’s work is subversive because he tells the truth as he sees it. He is not an opportunistic shockster, unlike many of his imitators.’

29 Lady Caroline Lamb
Lamb’s scandalous gothic novel ‘Glenarvon’, published anonymously in 1816, was based on her relationship with Byron, whom she met in 1812 when she was 27, married and the mother of an autistic son. She was thin and androgynous, qualities Byron liked: he encouraged her to dress as a page boy when in his company. When Byron tired of her, she attempted to woo him back by sending him clippings of her pubic hair. It didn’t work.

In her own words
‘It was past three o’clock, when Calantha opened the cabinet where the page’s clothes were formerly kept, and drew from thence his mantle and plumed hat; and thus disguised, prepared for the interview [with Glenarvon].’ (‘Glenarvon’)

28 JG Ballard
Our foremost chronicler of dystopian modernity, Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. He announced recently that he has advanced prostate cancer and that his latest book, the memoir ‘Miracles of Life’, will be his last.

In his own words
‘The crushed body of the sportscar had turned her into a being of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex.’ (‘Crash’)

Toby Litt (author ‘Corpsing’, ‘I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay’)
‘It’s no discovery, of course, that cars are objects of desire. But it took Ballard to go that logical extra step: if cars are going to get it on, then they need to crash. This isn’t just about Volvo-protected voyeurism, it’s about exchanging body fluids upon impact, it’s about suicidal interpenetrations. Ballard takes thing-sex to the point of polymorphous perversity. Anything can be sexier than sex – buildings, airplanes, deserted swimming pools. Even Shepperton. Or, as Ballard would insist, especially Shepperton.’

27 Patrick Marber
Ex-comic and co-creator of Alan Partridge; Marber’s now a playwright and screenwriter.

In his own words
Larry ‘You like him coming in your face?’
Anna ‘Yes.’
Larry ‘What does it taste like?’
Anna ‘It tastes like you, but sweeter.’ (‘Closer’)

Richard Eyre (scheduled original production of ‘Closer’ at the Cottesloe)
‘It was said of “Closer” that it was about “sexual politics”, but it’s a strength of the play that it’s not. It’s about sex. In the play sex is tender, romantic, loving, casual, intense, brutal, selfish, squalid, savage; a blessing and a curse. It’s the underscoring of each life. “Why is the sex so important?” is the agonised cry of Anna to her partner when they’re confessing their mutual infidelities. “BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING CAVEMAN!” screams Larry, the mild dermatologist.’

26 Mary Robinson
Actress Mary Robinson’s performance as Perdita in a 1779 production of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ so bewitched the 17-year-old Prince of Wales that she became his lover and one of London’s most notorious celebrities. Robinson went on to pen various poems, novels and feminist tracts, all of which were outstripped pornographically by her anonymously published pamphlet ‘Memoirs of Perdita’ (1784).

In her own words
‘At last a whole convocation of [ants] crept up the pillars of the Cytherean temple, sporting in those sacred places where “Jews might kiss, and Infidels adore”; nay a party of them had even the impudence to pervade the Sanctum Sanctorum or innermost apartment, where the novelty of the friction was so extraordinary as to rouse the sleeping beauty.’ (‘Memoirs of Perdita’)

25 Stewart Home
Home is an underground writer, artist and political activist born in London in 1962.

In his own words
‘Since my fingers were greased, I worked them into Sarah’s arse and soon she was bucking above me like an unbroken horse.’ (‘Cunt’)

James Bridle (blogger at booktwo.org)
‘Stewart Home’s early novels gained him the dubious title of a cult writer, his Richard Allen-inspired, philosophy-spouting skinheads fighting and fucking their way through a pre-Docklands East End of class war and bent coppers. This reputation belies his erudition as art critic and cultural theorist, exploring the literary possibilities of the sex doll in “69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess” and the alternative history of ’60s Notting Hill in “Tainted Love”.’

24 Molly Parkin
Artist, journalist and author Molly Parkin, 76, lives in a fuchsia-walled flat at World’s End, Kings Road, with her pornographic paintings. Born and raised in Pontycymmer, South Wales, she started life as an artist before becoming fashion editor of Nova, Harper’s & Queen and The Sunday Times in the 1960s. Life’s been eventful for this former drinking pal of the late Francis Bacon: childhood sex abuse, a rollercoaster career, two husbands, hundreds of lovers, bankruptcy and alcoholism. The epitome of bohemian London, the famously libidinous Parkin wrote the first of her ten erotic novels in 1972.
Read interview with Molly Parkin

23 Sebastian Horsley
Sebastian Horsley describes himself as a writer, artist and failed rock star (or suicide, depending on how melodramatic he feels), but none of these terms quite conveys the theatrical spectacle he has created. Best known for drugs, dandyism and having himself crucified in the name of art in the Philippines in 2000, Horsley admits to ‘reaching the limited genius available to people who can’t do anything’. Except, of course, Horsley has done plenty: most recently, written a salacious autobiography, flamboyantly titled ‘Dandy in the Underworld’.
Read interview with Sebastian Horsley

22 Oscar Moore
Oscar Moore was born in Barnet, north London, in 1960. After reading English at Cambridge he worked as a theatre critic for Time Out and Plays and Players. In 1991 he became editor of Screen International. The same year saw the publication of ‘A Matter of Life and Sex’ by Paper Drum. Moore had been HIV-positive since the mid-1980s. From 1993 until his death in 1996, he wrote a column for The Guardian, ‘PWA (Person With Aids)’, later collected in book form, in which he confronted the appalling deterioration in his health with remarkable courage.

In his own words
‘All the time he gorged and slurped on Hugo’s dick, he wanked his own, which swelled into a fat organ dribbling colourless fluid. Hugo moved his hips up and down, fucking the boy’s mouth… The holes in the walls had opened again and revealed a line of penises all aimed at him, all swollen, some purple with too much beating, others trapped inside their foreskins. They beat and beat like furious pistons.’
(‘A Matter of Life and Sex’)

Nicholas Royle (author ‘The Director’s Cut’, ‘Antwerp’)
‘Originally published by Brixton-based independent Paper Drum under the not-indecipherable pseudonym Alec F Moran, ‘A Matter of Life and Sex’, early chapters of which had been serialised in the wonderful magazine The Fred, was finally published under the author’s own name by Penguin in 1992. This highly graphic and sexually explicit tale of cottaging, escorting and clubbing is one of the most powerfully affecting and highly charged novels of the Aids era. It was so rude and so exciting, I began to wonder if I might have ticked the wrong box and wandered into the wrong lifestyle.’

21 Maxim Jakubowski
Maxim Jakubowski is well known to crime fans as a critic and as the owner of Murder One bookshop on Charing Cross Road. But his own fiction is largely in the erotica field. He’s proud to be known as ‘the king of the erotic thriller’, and hard-boiled sex noirs such as ‘The State of Montana’ and ‘Because She Thought She Loved Me’ have attracted Hollywood attention.

In his own words
‘To feel herself filled to the brim when he made love to her. To again experience a man’s cock growing inside her as it ploughed her, stretched her. To take a penis, savour its hardening inside her mouth, to hear a man moan above her as he came, shuddered, shouted out obscenities or religious adjectives, and experience the heat waves coursing from cunt to heart to brain… No fish face at the moment of climax with this new man.’ (‘Paris Noir’)

Matt Thorne (author ‘Tourist’, ‘Cherry’)
‘Unlike many erotic writers, who tend to grow shy when reading to an audience, Jakubowski is just as good at performing his work live, and I once witnessed him prove to be the only writer on a packed bill able to reduce a loud, rowdy audience to silence with the shocking explicitness of his prose.’

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20 Geoff Nicholson
Nicholson was born in Sheffield in 1953 and currently spends much of his time in the US, but he qualifies for this list on the strength of his best-known novel ‘Bleeding London’, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1997. He is fiction editor of Ambit magazine.

In his own words
‘When sex is good, I feel as though I’m disappearing, being pulverised… so that I’m nothing, just particles of air pollution, debris, particles of soot and skin floating through the air and settling on the city.’ (‘Bleeding London’)

Deborah Moggach, author ‘Tulip Fever’, ‘These Foolish Things’)
‘Geoff Nicholson was last heard of living with a pornographer in Brooklyn. London, however, has been the setting for many of his novels. One of my favourites is “Bleeding London”. What most impressed me was one of the characters, Judy, whose aim was to have sex in every postcode in the city. This is quite a feat (try to apply it to yourself – in my case it’s humiliatingly confined to the NWs).’
Deborah Moggach’s latest novel, ‘In the Dark’, is out now in paperback.

19 John Keats
Keats was born at 85 Moorgate in 1795. He wrote ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in Winchester in 1819. He lived in Hampstead until 1820 when he moved to Rome on the recommendation of his doctors, dying there of tuberculosis in 1821 aged just 25.

In his own words
‘Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.’
(‘The Eve of St Agnes’)

18 Mark Ravenhill
Playwright Ravenhill was born in West Sussex in 1966. His plays include ‘Shopping and Fucking’ and ‘Mother Clap’s Molly House’. A lover of pantomime, in 2006 he wrote a version of ‘Dick Whittington’ for the Barbican Theatre.

In his own words
Victor ‘[Masturbating the corpse of his dead partner, Tim, in the morgue] This is so shit. I hate this. Is this all there is? There’s got to be more than this.’ (‘Some Explicit Polaroids’)

Max Stafford-Clark (artistic director, Out of Joint)
‘The extraordinary success of Mark Ravenhill’s “Shopping and Fucking” was due in no small measure to the sexual promise contained in the title. There were a few people who resisted it. Neil Kinnock said he wasn’t drawn to a play about shopping – “and Glenys didn’t fancy the other”. In a candid moment, Mark, who still giggles helplessly at the prospect of ‘Pacific Rim cuisine’, confessed that he was both intrigued and appalled at the prospect of what men got up to with each other. The scene in “Some Explicit Polaroids” where Victor is masturbating the corpse of his dead partner catches Mark’s own glee and ambivalence. But we must value and cherish writers like Mark and Andrea Dunbar, who have dragged sex from the wings and restored it to its rightful place, centre stage.’

17 Daniel Defoe
Novelist, journalist and spy Defoe was born in 1660 in the London parish of St Giles Cripplegate, the son of a tallow chandler. He was imprisoned in Newgate in 1703 for writing a pamphlet satirising High Church extremism. His first novel, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, was followed by ‘Moll Flanders’ in 1722.

In his own words
‘Some of the servants likewise used me saucily, and had much ado to keep their hands off me.’ (Moll Flanders)

Justin Cartwright (author ‘The Promise of Happiness’, ‘Look At It This Way’)
‘In Defoe’s day there were 50,000 prostitutes in London, one tenth of the female population. “Moll Flanders” is written as the autobiography of a woman with no money and fewer scruples. She moves to London when she falls on hard times and is obliged to take up prostitution. Defoe applied not only wit to the subject, but also sympathy for his heroine. She may be a slapper, and she may deceive herself in her account of her life, but she is always acute in her observations, which is why it is such a terrific book. The book is littered with faux-naïf sentences like this one: “It is true that from the first hour I began to converse with him, I resolv’d to let him lye with me if he offer’d it: but it was because I wanted his help and assistance and I knew no other way of securing him than that.” That was the plight of penniless women in the eighteenth century.’ Justin Cartwright’s latest novel, ‘The Song Before it is Sung’, is out now in paperback.

16 William Wycherley
One of Charles II’s favourite courtiers, playwright Wycherley took advantage of the Restoration relaxation of the laws preventing women from appearing on stage. ‘The Country Wife’ (1675) is famous for its double entendres, especially the so-called ‘china scene’ (see below).

In his own words
Mrs Squeamish ‘Oh, lord, I’ll have some china too. Good Mr Horner, don’t think to give other people china, and me none; come in with me too.’ (‘The Country Wife’)

Jonathan Kent (directed ‘The Country Wife’ at Haymarket Theatre Royal)
‘Wycherley had an admirably clear-eyed view of sex – its irresistibility, its absurdity and the convolutions we all put ourselves through in its pursuit. [Theatre critic] Kenneth Tynan said of “The Country Wife” that it was the only play in the language that was entirely about sex. And so it is. A celebratory release, in the first flush of the Restoration. There was a fashion in the 1970s to emphasise the perceived “darker” side of his plays. I’m sure he would have found this bewildering – his criticisms of society are implicit, not explicit. And, above all, his plays are a celebration of the itch that drives us all. They’re not for the pallid.’

15 James Boswell
Boswell is best known as the companion and biographer of Dr Johnson. His ‘London Journal’ dates from 1762 and chronicles his sexual rapacity, which manifested itself in a fondness for outdoor sex with prostitutes.

In his own words
‘A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked if this was not extraordinary for human nature. I said twice as much might be, but this was not, although in my own mind I was somewhat proud of my performance.’ (‘Boswell’s London Journal: 1762-1763’)

Lynne Truss (author ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’)
‘James Boswell has never had the literary reputation he deserves. Dismissed in the nineteenth century as a Scottish fool who had written a masterpiece by accident, in the twentieth he became known principally for the sexual frankness of his London Journal (first published in 1950). “I picked up a girl in the Strand,” records the 22-year-old. “She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.” There are other mentions of his size, incidentally. One of his glories as a diarist is that he never starts a sentence with the words “Modesty forbids”.’

14 Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was a magistrate who founded the proto-police force the Bow Street Runners. His satirical novels, celebrated for the modern way that they foreground their own artifice, include ‘Joseph Andrews’, ‘Shamela’ (a parody of Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’, which Fielding loathed) and, of course, the bawdy picaresque ‘Tom Jones’, the tale of a fortunate and notably lusty foundling.

In his own words
‘ “Why, ma’am,” answered Mrs Honour, “he came into the room one day last week when I was at work, and there lay your ladyship’s muff on a chair, and to be sure he put his hands into it; that very muff your ladyship gave me but yesterday.” ’ (‘Tom Jones’)

Martin Amis (author ‘Money’, ‘London Fields’)
‘Fielding’s great influence on the English comic novel was the mock epic. So you describe a pub brawl as if it were a Homeric battle. That’s something he does a lot – the dignifying of atrocious behaviour with high language.’

Jonathan Coe (author ‘What a Carve Up!’, ‘The Rain Before it Falls’)
‘ “Tom Jones” is now seen as a bit blokey, but for me it was the book that threw the door wide open on the novel’s infinite possibilities. It’s formally radical – throughout the novel, Fielding keeps up a running commentary on his own procedures as a writer. At the same time, it excels at all the thrillingly vulgar devices without which a novel is dead on its feet: it’s full of jokes, suspense, cliffhangers, narrative reversals and pathos.’

13 Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud and family moved to London from Vienna in 1938, just over a year before his death. Freud believed that all neuroses have their roots in sexual repression. His pioneering ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ (1899) suggests that our repressed fantasies of, for example, committing incest with our parents are banished to the depths of our unconscious.

In his own words
‘We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realisation of complete satisfaction.’ (‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’)

Will Self (author ‘The Book of Dave’)
‘ “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” is a thriller: you are the detective and your own psyche is a mean streets of irrational impulses and dark desires. The famous case histories – “The Wolf Man”, “Anna O”, etc – are just that: examinations of crimes already committed in the subconscious of the neurotic victims. Pseudo-scientist, shouter-down of the shibboleths, a fabulist who contributed to the radical restructuring of the depth psychology of twentieth-century fiction – what could be more subversive than that? And all of it in Hampstead.’
Will Self’s new novel, ‘The Butt’, will be published by Bloomsbury on April 7.

12 Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi became famous writing about the sociosexual quandaries of British Asian men and, despite the myriad distractions of Shepherd’s Bush market, he’s still at it. He lets John O’Connell in on how sex scenes cheer his books up, why therapy’s ‘like a haircut’ and whether Martin Amis has ever met a Muslim. Read interview with Hanif Kureishi.

11 Havelock Ellis
Croydon-born sexual psychologist Ellis (1859-1939) was especially interested in modesty and narcissism. He was still a virgin at 32 when he married the feminist writer Edith Lees. She was a lesbian; they lived in separate houses. For years he thought he was impotent. Then, aged 60, he discovered that he was able to become aroused by watching women urinate.

In his own words
‘The relief of detumescence is not merely the relief of an evacuation; it is the discharge, by the most powerful apparatus for nervous explosion in the body, of the energy accumulated and stored up in the slow process of tumescence, and that discharge reverberates through all the nervous centres in the organism.’ (‘Studies in the Psychology of Sex’)

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10 John Cleland
Kingston-born John Cleland (1709-1789) wrote his novel ‘Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ in Fleet Prison to pay off his debts. He was arrested for obscenity in November 1749.

In his own words
‘Her sturdy stallion had now unbutton’d, and produced naked, stiff, and erect, that wonderful machine, which I had never seen before, and which, for the interest my own seat of pleasure began to take furiously in it, I star’d at with all the eyes I had.’ (‘Fanny Hill’)

9 Gerald Kersh
Pulp writer Kersh grew up in Teddington and published his first novel, ‘Jews Without Jehovah’, in 1934. ‘Night and the City’ followed in 1938 and was a bestseller.

In his own words
‘Zoë was a handsome girl… one of those girls whose breasts, mature at 15, rapidly swell to a flaccid over-ripeness in a humid atmosphere of eroticism, like tomatoes in a hothouse.’ (‘Night and the City’)

John King (author ‘The Football Factory’)
‘Gerald Kersh was a west London boy with family in Soho. “Night and the City” records a Soho of drinkers and dreamers, spivs and streetwalkers. Kersh offers a glimpse of a London that was rarely recorded, a flamboyant world he knew up close. “Night and the City” follows Harry Fabian, a pimp planning to repay the girl keeping him in suits and haircuts by selling her abroad as a sex slave.’

8 Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in 1343. He managed to juggle writing with the significant post of Comptroller of the Customs for the port of London, a title he held for 12 years.

In his own words
‘Derk was the night as pich, or as the cole/ And at the window out she putte hir hole/And Absolon, him fil no bet ne wers/But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers/Ful savourly, er he was war of this.’ (‘The Miller’s Tale’)

Jonathan Trigell (author ‘Boy A’, ‘Cham’)
‘Geoff really comes into his own when he lets drop the chivalry and lets rip with the bawdry. “The Miller’s Tale” has tub-hopping two-timing and a third suitor tricked into kissing the giggling owner’s arse instead of the imagined innocent lips: it predates “Porky’s” by 600 years.’

7 William Shakespeare
Everyone knows that Shakespeare is full of rude bits, especially puns on ‘Will’ and, of course, all that business in ‘Twelfth Night’ with Olivia’s Cs, Us and Ts. Thomas Bowdler was so enraged by it that in 1818 he published ‘Family Shakespeare’, a censored version of the plays which cut passages he considered obscene.

In his own words
‘Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry/Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.’ (‘Venus and Adonis’)

Jonathan Bate (professor of English, Warwick University)
‘I’ve been wondering recently which are Shakespeare’s most Shakespearean plays. I think one answer might be “Love’s Labour’s Lost”, a comedy packed with wit, elegance, philosophical reflection and filthy jokes. For Shakespeare, love meant immersing oneself in each of these four dimensions. To put it more bluntly, Shakespeare at one and the same time had the most brilliant and most sexed-up mind you could possibly imagine.’

Stella Duffy (author ‘Mouths of Babes’, ‘The Room of Lost Things’)
‘From Mistress Quickly’s innuendo through the hungrier of the sonnets to the passionate porn of Hamlet in his meanest scenes with Ophelia, Shakespeare has the widest range of rude. One of the reasons he’s better than most is that unlike many of his contemporaries, his women’s mouths are as dirty and smart as the men’s.’ ‘The Room of Lost Things’ is published by Virago at £14.99.

6 John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
Drunken wit and parodist John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) was famous for his ‘extravagant frolics’ at the court of Charles II, whose patronage he spurned by writing the poem ‘A Satyr on Charles II’: ‘Poor prince! Thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court/Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.’ He lived two lives: one of rural domesticity, the other of urban decadence, with male lovers and several mistresses.

In his own words
‘Each imitative branch does twine/In some loved fold of Aretine/And nightly now beneath their shade/Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.’ (‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’)

Tom Morris (associate director, National Theatre)
‘Rochester reminds me of an unhinged poacher, moving noiselessly through the night and shooting every convention that moves. Bishop Burnett, who coached him to an implausible death-bed repentance, said that he was unable to express any feeling without oaths and obscenities. He seemed like a punk in a frock coat. But once the straw dolls have been slain, Rochester celebrates in a sexual landscape all of his own.’

5 Thomas Nashe
Nashe was an Elizabethan pamphleteer and satirist born in 1567. He’s best known now for the picaresque novel ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’.

In his own words
‘My little dildo shall supply their kinde/A knave, that moves as light as leaves by winde/That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale/But stands as stiff, as he were made of steele’ (‘Choice of Valentines’)

Robert Lewis (author ‘Swansea Terminal’)
‘Nashe’s saltiest piece of doggerel is a 316-line poem about what can happen when your local wench goes upmarket. After tracking his down in a Southwark brothel, our young Roister Doister hands over a small fortune to the madam only to find that in the clinch, his manhood is not up to the job. Whereupon she whips out her dildo and finishes herself off, giving rise to much reflection on the potency/pointlessness of the male member. It existed rather furtively in manuscipt form only until printed as Victorian smut.’

4 Algernon Charles Swinburne
Born 1837, tiny Swinburne had two key obsessions: the Middle Ages and lesbianism. He liked to be flogged; also to advertise his deviance – he spread a rumour that he had had sex with, then eaten, a monkey. Oscar Wilde was sceptical and called Swinburne ‘a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser’.

In his own words
‘Saw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten/Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute-strings.’ (‘Sapphics’) Jilly Cooper (author ‘Riders’, ‘Wicked!’) ‘Oh, he’s so erotic! He talks about exchanging “the lilies and languours of virtue/For the raptures and roses of vice”. He was alcoholic, and a sado-masochist, and very frowned on at the time. Robert Buchanan described Swinburne’s and [fellow poet] Dante Rossetti’s style of poetry as the Fleshly School of Poetry because he thought it depraved. In the 1870s, Rossetti called a meeting to decide what to do “for and about Swinburne”. And their friend, the lawyer Theodore Watts, took charge of him and pretty much locked him in a house in Putney for the next 30 years to save him from himself and allow him to write.’

3 Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan was born in Birmingham in 1927. As theatre critic of The Observer he championed kitchen-sink dramas like ‘Look Back in Anger’ and inspired fear with his ruthless wit. He was the first man to say ‘fuck’ on British TV. Mary Whitehouse suggested that Tynan should ‘have his bottom spanked’, little suspecting how much the self-confessed sadomasochist would have loved that.

In his own words
‘Since last November I have been seeing (and spanking) a fellow spanking addict, a girl called Nicole [a pseudonym]. Her fantasy – dormant until I met her – is precisely to be bent over with knickers taken down to be spanked, caned or otherwise punished, preferably with the buttocks parted to disclose the anus.’ (‘The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan’)

Jane Edwardes (theatre editor, Time Out)
‘Tynan was a star-fucker, a socialist with a taste for spanking, and an elegant writer with a cause. Nearly 30 years after his death, his shadow still looms large over those who have taken up seats in the stalls.’

2 Alan Hollinghurst
Novelist and poet Hollinghurst, 54, first gained plaudits for his 1988 novel ‘The Swimming Pool Library’, a vivid and explicit account of London gay life in the early 1980s. He won the Booker Prize in 2004 for ‘The Line of Beauty’.

In his own words
‘His middle finger pushed into the deep divide, as smooth as a boy’s, his fingertip even pressed a little way into the dry pucker so that Leo let out a happy grunt.’(‘The Line of Beauty’)

Charlotte Mendelson (author ‘When We Were Bad’, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem’)
‘Alan Hollinghurst’s novels are brilliant for so many reasons. But his most astonishing gift is that he makes every reader, of whatever sexual orientation, quiver with homoerotic longing. He turns us all into shyly arty gay men with rampaging but misdirected libidos, and we enjoy every minute of it.’

'Around all is the ivory flesh of belly and thighs': Lying girl with violet stockings, Egon Schiele

1 Walter, aka Henry Spencer Ashbee
Born in Southwark in 1834, Henry Spencer Ashbee was a textile trader by profession. But his hobby was collecting pornography from around the world and indexing it in bibliographies with fantastically cumbersome titles like ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio-Biblio- Icono-graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books’. He was part of a loose fraternity of sex-obsessed Victorian gentlemen which included the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (see No 4) and Richard Francis Burton, the Orientalist writer-explorer who first translated the ‘Kama Sutra’ into English. Ashbee is generally believed to be ‘Walter’, the pseudonymous author of the sexual memoir ‘My Secret Life’, first published in 1888 in Amsterdam and effectively banned for the next 100 years. (A printer from Bradford who attempted to publish it privately in 1969 was sentenced to two years in prison for purveying filth.) Only 20 or so copies of the multi-volume work were originally printed. Magician and occultist Aleister Crowley owned a complete set, as did silent film star Harold Lloyd. The word ‘cunt’ is used by Walter 5,357 times in the course of the memoir, while ‘frig’ appears 1,299 times.

In his own words
‘There is no more exquisite, voluptuously thrilling sight, than that of a well-formed woman sitting or lying down naked, with legs closed, her cunt hidden by the thighs, and only indicated by the shade from the curls of her motte, which thicken near to the top of the temple of Venus as if to hide it. Then as her thighs gently open and the gap in the bottom of her belly opens slightly with them, the swell of the lips show, the delicate clitoris and nymphae are disclosed, and all is fringed with crisp, soft, curly, shiny hair, whilst around all is the smooth ivory flesh of belly and thighs…’ (‘My Secret Life’)

Sarah Waters (author ‘Fingersmith’, ‘Tipping the Velvet’)
‘I first came across “My Secret Life” while researching nineteenth-century sexual underworlds. I read it alongside various pieces of Victorian pornography, but Walter’s 11-volume sexual memoir is much stranger, more endearing and more compelling than mere porn. A brilliant storyteller who was prepared to go literally anywhere for a fuck, he gives us a Kinsey-esque cross-section of nineteenth-century erotic life, leading us unblushingly into all those urban spaces – the bedrooms, the brothels, the privies, the darkened parks and omnibuses – which lurk just beyond the margins in the work of more respectable London writers like Dickens and Wilkie Collins. It’s fascinating, eye-opening stuff.’

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24 Molly Parkin
‘I came to writing books because Hunter Davies, my editor on The Look pages of The Sunday Times, went to lunch with Blond & Briggs, a tiny ublishing house. They said they were looking for writers and he said, “Well, Mol’s driving us fucking mad in the office saying she wants to be doing novels now and she doesn’t want to be doing fashion. I’ll have a word.” So he had a word and they asked for a sample. I went home and wrote 750 words, the opening of my first novel “Love All”. The first line was: ‘“Lick it,’ he said, and took his teeth out, put them on the mantlepiece and lay down on the cold lino with his legs apart…”

‘Blond & Briggs didn’t like it, but their secretary started reading it and she said to them: “This is fantastic, no women are writing like this.” The only woman who was writing anything vaguely sexy was Jackie Collins, who had just done “The World is Full of Married Men”. I hadn’t read that; it was too trashy for me.’

‘Love All’ was an immediate hit, and the reviews were mostly good. ‘Quite the funniest novel I’ve read in a long time, written with the lightest of touches and a mirthful sense of its own libidinousness,’ said The Daily Telegraph. ‘Molly’s approach to sex is that it is fun and funny,’ said Cosmopolitan. ‘I did have a negative review in The Irish Times which said it was “disgusting”,’ she recalls. ‘My novels have been called “downright filth” and “outright porn”, but that doesn’t bother me. I choose to call them “comic erotica”.’

The twinkly eyed Parkin says she’s always found the raunchy side of life very funny. ‘I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning to start writing; I would laugh out loud as I wrote. Everything was autobiographical. I had a lot to draw on: I’d had most of Real Madrid in my bed and I’d fucked an entire rugby team on a trip to Scotland. I even used to sleep in older men’s beds when I was still a virgin. I always managed to pop an 80-year-old in [a novel] if I could. They may not be good at getting erections but they are very good at cunnilingus; you know, gums on soft tissue.’

Parkin’s second novel, ‘Up Tight’ (1975), got a lot of publicity on the back of fashion photographer Harry Peccinotti’s provocative cover photo. ‘I told him I wanted a close-up of knickers and I wanted broderie Anglaise knickers, but he got some French model who was wearing see-through knickers so Hatchards kept it under the counter.

‘Somebody said to me once: “You changed the face of publishing.” Well, I jumped from publisher to publisher to get the best deal. In me they had an author who was willing to go out on the road and do signings. Up until that time it had been quite a rare thing to have a female author and get her to do things. I loved it: this was my public.’

The last of her novels, ‘Breast Stroke’ (1983), was the hardest to write. ‘The alcohol had taken over by then,’ she says, ‘and I only had a fortnight to write it. I did that with chocolate and cigarettes living in a hovel in Wales after my second divorce and my mother was dying. Things weren’t good, but that didn’t affect the writing.

‘I never planned the books; you don’t know quite where you are going. Some characters who you think are going to be your main characters fall by the wayside, and others who are in the shadows come forward. Then suddenly someone is fucking someone you never imagined!’

Interview: Maggie Davis. Portrait Rob Greig.

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23 Sebastian Horsley
Horsley lives in the heart of Soho, tucked behind a door that proclaims: ‘This is not a brothel. There are no prostitutes at this address.’ Inside, he has created a red velvet haven – or hell, as he prefers to term it. There is an open fire and a throne and the walls are plastered with photos of himself, Guns N’Roses (he’s a big fan) and, occasionally, his muse (he hates the word girlfriend) Rachel Garley.

‘Living in Soho is like an ongoing orgasm,’ Horsely enthuses. Indeed, talking about Soho is the only thing that seems to excite him as much as talking about himself. ‘God created the country, Satan created Soho. It is proof that hell is full and the damned walk the streets. It is a madhouse without walls.’ It suits Horsley perfectly, but he worries that it’s going downhill: ‘Ten years ago, on a good night here you could get your throat cut. Now there’s even a health club in Soho! Can you imagine that? It has really got worse. The air used to be clean and the sex used to be dirty, and now it’s the other way around. The only pocket of resistance is my house.’

The problem with Horsley’s witty lines is that they’re quotations from his book. He’s the first to admit it. ‘I don’t talk, I quote. I can’t help it,’ he says. ‘It’s better to be quotable than honest.’ Although his book reads like fiction, he is adamant that everything is true – or almost everything. ‘Little stories are changed around. I say that I injected cocaine into my knob but that was actually heroin.’ Whatever you think of ‘Dandy in the Underworld’, he protests that he never wanted to be a writer anyway. ‘I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say “pass the mustard”.’

Horsley’s views are extreme and often offensive (he has described Texans as ‘living proof that Indians screwed buffaloes’, and proclaimed that nearly all women are ‘astonishingly stupid’), but he’s quick to defend himself. ‘Let’s just say for the sake of argument that I am a misogynist,’ he purrs. ‘If I want to dislike women I should be allowed to. As it happens I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained. I just like pissing people off. I like language and it excites me to write violently against things that I love. Everyone knows it isn’t right to go and chop women’s heads off. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to say stupid, outrageous things? If you don’t like them, you can suck my Nazi cock.’

Unlikely though it may seem, Horsley is actually good and charming company. When asked about his sordid exploits, he replies, ‘I consider myself to be very correct and proper, an upright citizen. If you took away the drink and the drugs, I would be a policeman. Think of how many boring, blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretion of me.’

Interview: Sonya Barber. Portrait Rob Greig.

‘Dandy in the Underworld’ is published by Sceptre at £16.99.

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12 Hanif Kureishi
Shepherd’s Bush market is quiet on weekday afternoons. Hanif Kureishi moves around the stalls – some selling tat, others jewellery, luggage and bolts of bright cloth – with a boxer’s hunched attentiveness. Then he stops, as if transfixed by a beautiful painting, or an instance of unexpected public nudity.

‘Look at that,’ he says, pointing at an illuminated, smoothly scrolling panorama of the Dubai skyline. ‘Isn’t it great? I really want one of those. But my missus won’t let me.’ He tries to get me to buy it for my daughter – ‘Go on, it’s a tenner. She’d love it’ – but I make the same cast-iron excuse.

We exit on to Goldhawk Road. In the mid-’60s this was a drag strip for mods, but it’s long been a magnet for immigrant communities. A character in Kureishi’s new novel, ‘Something To Tell You’, observes that the area now resembles ‘a great Middle Eastern city’, although narrator Jamal’s take is less romantic: ‘Alcoholics and nutters begged and disputed on the street continuously; drug dealers on bikes waited on street corners.’

'Intimacy' the film

‘They haven’t really gentrified Shepherd’s Bush,’ says Kureishi of the place he’s called home since 1993. ‘They’ve tried to. When I moved here, I bought another house as well. The estate agent said, “This is great, in ten years it’ll be worth a million quid. I walked past it the other day and there were two guys pissing in the basement. If I see that fucking estate agent again…’

Kureishi lives with his partner and youngest son. His two other sons, twins, live round the corner with his ex-partner. This might surprise anyone who has read ‘Intimacy’, the grimly compelling novella Kureishi wrote about their separation, but he says it works: ‘It wouldn’t for everyone, but it does for us. And I like to see the boys, to be part of their everyday lives.’

Ramzi Mohammed, the only one of the July 21 bombers to leave a suicide note, ran a stall here, handing out free books and tapes promoting Islam. Kureishi and I are about to pass an Islamic bookshop when suddenly he has an idea: ‘Come on, let’s find some books about bomb-making!’ We look hard, but there don’t seem to be any. There is, however, a video called ‘Why Islam Rejects Terrorism’. Kureishi chuckles: ‘You don’t read about that in the papers, do you?’

Kureishi is 53 now, with a shock of well-cut salt-and-pepper hair. The world was very different in 1990, the year his first novel ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ came out. He remembers ‘some condescension; it wasn’t thought to be a proper literary novel’, but it now enjoys classic, set-text status.

‘Buddha’ was part of what publishers like to call ‘the first wave of immigrant writing’, blasting a path for Zadie Smith, Monica Ali et al. Kureishi’s interest is still in London as a world city, a hub of shifting, competing ethnicities. ‘I was in Germany a couple of weeks ago and they don’t have any understanding of that at all,’ he says. ‘They referred to me all the time as an immigrant, as if I’d just got off the fucking boat with my bag. They’d ask things like, “As an immigrant family, are you feeling more settled in England now?” I’d think: For God’s sake! You don’t have any idea, do you? Germans have this sense of themselves as a Teutonic homogenous race with all this riff-raff around the side.’

It’s a shock to revisit earlier Kureishi works like ‘The Black Album’ and ‘My Son The Fanatic’ and realise just how accurately he predicted the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, bombs and all. In his first film, ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’, there’s a famous piece of dialogue where one of the characters says of Pakistan, ‘This country is being sodomised by religion. It’s starting to interfere with the making of money.’ Is that becoming true of Britain? Could anyone have predicted 20 years ago that the Archbishop of Canterbury would one day give a speech recommending the accommodation of sharia law?

‘It’s just funny, isn’t it? Very, very funny. My friend [director] Stephen Frears has a house in Dorset, and as we’re sitting around down there watching TV we discuss our idea for a film a bit like “Passport to Pimlico” in which sharia law is introduced into Dorset. You know: if you take multiculturalism all the way, that’s what you end up with – amputations in Dorset.’ He laughs. ‘It’s the ultimate irony. The West tried so hard after Nietzsche to remove religion from its structures. You have a couple of decades without much of it and then it comes back with a bang. You can’t say fairer than that. Even a Freudian would laugh. The return of the repressed!’

As it happens, repression (of memories and desires) is one of the main themes of ‘Something To Tell You’ – a vital, teeming, panoramic, immersive novel which straddles three decades in the life of its psychotherapist narrator, a man who has seen and heard everything, but also committed a crime which, though arguably honourable, continues to haunt him. It’s one of Kureishi’s best, and looks set to be his biggest commercial success since ‘Buddha’: in a move almost unprecedented for literary fiction, Tesco is stocking it. ‘Faber kept phoning me to tell me,’ says Kureishi. ‘They were really excited. It didn’t seem very impressive to me, and then I realised it was.’ He sighs. ‘ “Literary fiction”. If you hear those words, you might as well cut your fucking throat.’

The novel took Kureishi a long time to write (‘five, six, seven years’). ‘I wanted it to be like “Buddha” only modern,’ he explains. ‘The love story came first: a boy and a girl, two Indians, at university during punk. It was going to be a novella, but it bored me. When I turned 50 I realised I’d lived for quite a long time. I’d lived through all this stuff and I wanted to put it all in.’

Being an analyst grants Jamal access to all areas of society. He can go up to glitzy parties (there’s a funny scene with Mick Jagger in a Claridge’s suite), then down to brothels and piss-stinking pubs. ‘You need that in a narrator,’ Kureishi concedes, ‘otherwise you can’t knit all the different bits of a novel together. Society is so divided; someone like Dickens would have known everybody – politicians, lawyers, publishers. But it’s difficult to move from here to the Law Courts. I grew up on the nineteenth-century novel, on Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy, and I think most of us still think that that’s what the novel is: capacious and deeply philosophical and political, but also a soap opera.’

Kureishi might have added: and full of sex. There’s lots of sex in ‘Something To Tell You’, as there is in everything he writes. Charlie and Karim from ‘Buddha’ make guest appearances – for an orgy. And Jamal always seems to be having sex. He walks into rooms and women drop to their knees and unzip him. What’s his secret?

Kureishi giggles. ‘Actually, I showed an early draft to a friend and she pointed out a place in the book where Jamal says, “I’ve always been promiscuous.” And she said, “Well, he’s not that promiscuous. His wife won’t shag him and he never shags anyone else apart from a few whores.” So yes, I put in a bit more just to cheer him up. I know the scenes you’re referring to, ha ha!’

Even the prostitutes seem to be having fun. ‘I wouldn’t have said that,’ he counters. ‘I don’t think he would think for a moment that he’s giving deep satisfaction to these women. But he does have a good time, and I’m glad he does. Analysts can always get laid because they know how to listen to women. Chicks love them.’

I assume Kureishi has had therapy himself? ‘Yeah. There were times in my life when it stopped me being self-destructive. The rest of the time it’s a bit like personal grooming – like having a haircut. It just cheers you up.’

Kureishi tries to keep a strict routine, getting up at seven and writing until noon. He teaches, too – creative writing at Kingston University, for which he is paid, he says, considerably less than the £80,000 a year Martin Amis is alleged to earn at Manchester. Amis’s interest in Islam intrigues Kureishi: ‘He must have known that the most interesting subjects for a long time have been race and religion, so he had to get onto it, as he has with this new book [‘The Second Plane’]. But Amis has never met a Muslim. The only Muslim he’s ever met is Salman [Rushdie]! Salman must be his model, ha ha ha!’

We walk around Shepherd’s Bush Green, past the shopping centre and the Vue cinema and down towards Holland Park. We say goodbye outside the tube station. Kureishi says he’s going home, but I don’t believe him. I think he’s going straight back to the market to buy a flashing Jesus tea-tray.

Interview John O'Connell. Portrait Rob Greig.

‘Something To Tell You’ will be published by Faber on March 6.

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