I’m not saying I knew much about the world of discos or killer sharks, but Robbins’s world of Hollywood high living and eternal shagging was a challenge to my imagination. I had more trouble with The Carpetbaggers. I also read Jaws but scarcely got beyond the sex scene on the beach before I came across the gouging Great White and the word ‘sinew’, which I’d never encountered before. I noted this cultural deﬁcit in my compendium of things to complain about to God but I read The Bitch myself on the way home and remember a very fruity passage in which the heroine, a woman who owned a disco and was called Fontaine, has sex in a hot tub with a very unsuitable man who might or might not have been in the Maﬁa. When I was about ten I went to a jumble sale to buy books only to discover that everything that wasn’t a copy of Jaws was by Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, or Danielle Steel. Yet if you were a working-class boy in the 1970s, badly written books about fucking – quickly followed in the 1980s by badly written books about shopping-and-fucking – were the kinds of book your mother read, and so, to be fair, did your father, and to be even fairer, 400 million other people. But it’s so much sexier when people don’t have sex on the page. Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree: the goings-on in Ovid, the whipping in Sade, the bare-arsed wrestling in Lawrence, the garter-snapping in Anaïs Nin, the wife-swapping in Updike, the arcs of semen hither and yon.

W hen it comes to erotic writing, the more explicit it gets – the more heaving, the more panting – the more I want to laugh.

If you liked 50 shades of grey book