The Kama Sutra, compiled by Vatsayayan some time in the third century, is the oldest and most notable of a group of texts on erotic love from ancient India known generically as the Kama Shastras.

In order to elevate our animal instincts to a more refined form of pleasure, I turned to the Kama Sutra, which remains a groundbreaking work thousands of years after it was written. Yes, it is possible to throw yourself on top of your partner and hammer your way to an ejaculation in a matter of seconds but, as journalist and author Yasmin Alibhai Brown says, ‘there is a difference between a fu*k and experience’. When a lion has sex the female knows it…’ Except, we are not animals. Someone recently said to me, ‘All this seduction stuff is crap. Simon Raven’ wasn’t alone in his way of thinking. One good reason for doing so is that there are still people in our culture who find sex an overrated sensation lasting a bare ten seconds.’ Simon Raven finds sex an “overrated sensation which lasts a bare ten seconds” - and then wonders why anyone should bother to translate the erotic textbooks of medieval India. My motivation in writing this book is best summed up by this response by Dr Alex Comfort (translator of the Ananga Ranga) to a reader in the New Statesman: ‘Mr. It seeks to transform what has largely been reduced to instant gratification into a rather more sensuous experience. This book is a guide to having great sex in the twenty-first century.

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