My year as a sex maniac, by Spectator critic who sparked fury by lusting over a blonde don in Cambridge
He's the man who, last week, suddenly became the No 1 hate figure for countless women across the country.
Writer Lloyd Evans triggered uproar for admitting that he had lost control of his 'lunatic libido' after attending a lecture by 'blonde' woman professor Lea Ypi in Cambridge and then paying for sex at a massage parlour.
Although the 60-year-old yesterday responded to the furore by saying: 'I don't feel like much of a sex pervert,' The Mail on Sunday can reveal that three years ago he wrote a novella entitled My Year As A Sex Maniac.
The autobiographical work was based on his time at The Spectator, the magazine where he has a column and where the offending article was published last week.
The 99-page sexual fantasy is a fascinating insight into his attitudes towards women and sex.
Lloyd Evans poses for a photograph for MailOnline on his doorstep in East London on Thursday
London School of Economics professor Professor Lea Ypi, pictured in Turin in May 2022
Evans writes how, as a 37-year-old, he confessed to on-off girlfriend 'Emma' that he had 'sex on the brain'.
'I told her that every day, all day long, I walk the streets and fancy women. All over the place. I told her how painful it was to be tormented by gorgeous women.'
Significantly, much of My Year As A Sex Maniac (subtitled Obsession, Anguish And Bliss), is set around the then office of The Spectator in London's Bloomsbury.
Evans describes a woman called 'Kimberly' as 'young and beautiful and cold'.
In real life, the magazine's publisher at the time was California-born Kimberly Fortier, who had a string of suitors, including Spectator contributor Simon Hoggart (with a long career working for the Guardian) and Labour politician David Blunkett, who resigned as Home Secretary in 2004 when it emerged he had fast-tracked her nanny's visa application. Another columnist had a sexual liaison with the magazine's receptionist.
Evans's fantasy exposes the bohemian underbelly of life at a magazine that to the outside world was a high-minded, Tory political publication. This hotbed of intrigue and infidelity, casual affairs and sexual shenanigans – sometimes breathlessly reported in the now defunct red-top tabloid newspaper the News of the World – led the magazine to become nicknamed The Sextator.
Professor Ypi attending the Ondaatje Prize Awards at Temple Place in London in May 2022
The book is currently selling on Amazon for £4.08 new. It has five stars with three ratings
Professor Ypi at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival in March 2022 in Oxford
Evans wrote about a visit to a massage parlour after watching a lecture by Professor Ypi
Indeed, such was the public interest in these goings-on that Evans co-wrote a West End farce, Who's The Daddy?, about what went on. It was described at the time as 'lots of s******* in cupboards'. Evans's own 'sexcapade' with 'Emma', recorded in his novella, is equally priapic.
At her flat, the couple have sex, described by Evans in robust and forensic detail. This sets the book's tone. Much of which is not for the faint-hearted.
'It hurt my tongue a little and took about five minutes,' he writes of one bit of sexual interplay –which he later describes as a 'mechanical task with nothing to do but watch the clock'.
The memoir appears to be the legacy of a doomed love affair between a besotted Evans and a real-life Emma. He went on to marry Celia Pilkington, archivist at London's Inner Temple, though they have since separated.
In his fantasy, Evans wrote that, post-Emma, he married a woman he described as 'pragmatic, good fun, not imaginative'. It remains a mystery why Evans, now single, published his book more than 20 years after the events on which it centres.
In his biography on Amazon – where his book is available – Evans writes that while he has 'won awards as a poet and a playwright' he 'needs money as well as prizes' – though, around 140,000 on Amazon's bestseller list, it is unlikely he has made much from the royalties.
This weekend, Evans remains unrepentant about writing of his 'lunatic libido', telling yesterday's Daily Mail that his critics should 'get out of the basement and get a bit of action, even if you have to pay for it'.
A sentiment expressed in the opening pages of Sex Maniac: 'What's the point in being single if you can't enjoy the wilder and more outrageous aspects of it?'
