Slightly by contrast, I’m afraid, are the mucky stories collected in In Bed With. There’s the odd good one, though the age-old apparatus of wolfish spankers, horny-handed mechanicals and bored housewives feature prominently.

The problem is that over the whole project there hangs a ghastly pall of tweeness, very straightforwardly explained by the subtitle. Needing to boast of being ‘unashamed’ rather implies that shame is on your mind — and as for the claim that the contributors are ‘your favourite women novelists’, most readers will think: ‘I’ll be the judge of that, lassies.’

So unashamed are my favourite women novelists — from Ali Smith and Esther Freud to Rachel Johnson and Kathy Lette — that they’ve all taken pseudonyms and are writing under their ‘porn names’, compounded from the names of their first pet and their street. Thus ‘Minxy Malone’, ‘Storm Henley’ and, er, ‘Samantha Sutton Place’. Can you guess who’s who? Care much?

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