GQ Archive

Remember that for most of the last century this country’s iconic woman—our Madonna, as it were (in both the Catholic and the American senses)—was Queen Victoria. She might have been sex-on-a-stick for poor Prince Albert, and maybe that funny Scottish chap, but not for anyone else. For the rest of us, sex—unless

And yet even in the dark years of this century, Britsex bubbled under, though in an infantile way: … an erotic vocabulary composed entirely of squeals and giggles; even the very words “slap and tickle”, a euphemism for the carnal act no other nation on the planet could have coined… And that

It’s especially good that, although British men are notoriously lousy lovers, British women have learnt to expect little more and in fact find earnest male insistence (say, a ten hour Gallic span of attention to the clitoris) only theoretically desirable. Nicholas Lezard, “In Praise of British Women”, GQ, December 1996, p.178 Favorite0