With cost of non-living hikes and the possible reintroduction of college fees looming like Swords of Damocles, scholars are going to have to rely even more on the simple pleasures – and the cheap ones – to get through the lean winter terms. The cheapest and simplest of those pleasures being reading. Or rutting. Or better again, reading about rutting.

Sex and the written word: a twin lineage older than the oldest profession. Let’s leave aside such hallowed suck ’n’ fuck-books as Donkey Girl Goes To Hollywood or Slut Squads From Mars right now – for a history lesson, the avid erotomaniac could do much worse than start with the carnal anger of the Psalms, proceed to the Kama Sutra and work all the way up to the auto-erotic vistas of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Or alternatively, one might save time and plough through De Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom, which is pretty much a combination of all three in one consumer-friendly volume.

True, the best books about sex aren’t really “about” sex at all, but use lust as the thermonuclear charge that drives the narrative. Sex scenes in fiction – from the Mills & Boon school of throbbing manhoods and heaving bosoms to Dennis Cooper’s shit-smelling fisting sessions – get mighty tedious if the yarn’s no cop.

In this respect, the French have always been the masters, whether producing their own homegrown scribes (check out George Bataille’s The Story Of The Eye, a slim but sexy novella much beloved of Bjork, and the pseudonymous Story Of O). In fact, the legendary Olympia Press kept itself afloat by publishing porno and avant-garde classics under the one roof.

More recently Philippe Dijian’s 37°2 Le Matin (Betty Blue) treated sex as a kind of gateway drug to obsession, madness, disfigurement and merciful death.

Speaking of the language of lurve in the city of lights, connoisseurs should also tick off Henry Miller’s Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn as classics of sex-brainiac misanthropy. And if ye seek Miller, ye shall also find Anaïs Nin’s Diaries or Henry & June or The Spy In The House Of Love.

Nabokov’s Lolita (also published by Olympia Press), is less about sex than the love that dare not speak its name, the one between man and child-girl.

Transgressive literature has taken many forms throughout the ages – the controversy over DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had far more to do with social than sexual mores, telling of the steamy affair between the wife of a crippled English aristocrat and a gamekeeper. The protagonists explored a different class of deviancy in JG Ballard’s beautifully written but ice cold Crash, getting their kicks through crashing cars and masturbating over pictures of road victims.

More recently, fiction writers have argued the case for a new, quality kind of pornography based on plots as much as cum-shots. From Hell author Alan Moore is hell-bent on redeeming the genre in his new project, while the opulent lesbiana of Sarah Waters novels like Tipping The Velvet is currently infiltrating the mainstream via the BBC.

But the Oscar for the hottest literary sex soliloquy outside of Lesbo Nymphos Weekly must go to Jimmy Joyce for his evocation of Molly Bloom gagging for it at the end of Ulysses.

Nice one JJ. In a word:

Yessssss!