Sex and books: London's most erotic writers

London has always been a palace of sexual varieties: both the hub of Britain’s sex trade and the chamber in which, since the advent of the printed word, debates about liberty, repression and obscenity have raged and (occasionally) been resolved. It’s the country’s erotic centre – its G-spot, if you will. Which is why Time Out decided it was high time to consider the ways in which sex has been celebrated by London writers down the centuries.

Our Top 30 chart of London’s rudest writers collects, in a single heaving but well-ventilated space, the authors we feel have contributed the most to our understanding of the city’s complex sexual psychology. What do we mean by ‘rude’? Boldly transgressive as well as pornographic (after all, anyone can be pornographic), seductive and titillating as well as obscene and, always, well written.

One of the functions of nostalgia is to purge the past of elements that don’t chime with our limited sense of how people once lived. So it’s salutary, and oddly bracing, to be reminded that dildos were around in the sixteenth century (Thomas Nashe) and that ‘cunt’ (okay, ‘queynte’) was a slang term for female genitalia in Chaucer’s day.

But don’t just take our word for it. Our saucy scribblers come endorsed by some of London’s finest contemporary writers, including Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Will Self and Jilly Cooper.

So put down your whip, unbuckle that gimp mask and let’s begin…

1 Walter, aka Henry Spencer Ashbee
2 Alan Hollinghurst
3 Kenneth Tynan
4 Algeron Charles Swinburne
5 Thomas Nashe
6 John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
7 William Shakespeare
8 Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Gerald Kersh
10 John Cleland
11 Havelock Ellis
12 Hanif Kureishi
13 Sigmund Freud
14 Henry Fielding
15 James Boswell
16 William Wycherley
17 Daniel Defoe
18 Mark Ravenhill
19 Geoff Nicholson
20 Maxim Jakubowski

21 Oscar Moore
23 Sebastian Horsley
24 Molly Parkin
25 Stewart Home
26 Mary Robinson
27 Patrick Marber
28 JG Ballard
29 Lady Caroline Lamb
30 Anthony Neilson

Thanks to Jane Edwardes, Rachel Halliburton, Nina Caplan, Jonathan Derbyshire. Portraits Simian Coates and Rob Greig