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 suddenly became the number one hate figure for countless women across the country last week.

Writer Lloyd Evans caused a stir by admitting he lost control of his ‘crazy libido’ after attending a lecture by ‘blonde’ female professor Lea Ypi in Cambridge and then paying for sex in a massage parlour.

Although the 60-year-old responded to the furore yesterday by saying: ‘I don’t really feel like a sex pervert’, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that three years ago he wrote a novella called 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 appeared last week.

The 99-page sexual fantasy is a fascinating insight into his attitudes towards women and sex.

Professor Lea Ypi, professor at the London School of Economics, 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, I walk through the streets and like women. Everywhere. I told her how painful it was to be tormented by beautiful women.”

Significantly, much of My Year As A Sex Maniac (subtitled Obsession, Anguish And Bliss) is set around the then offices of The Spectator in London’s Bloomsbury.

Evans describes a woman named “Kimberly” as “young and beautiful and cold.”

In real life, the magazine’s then publisher was California-born Kimberly Fortier, who had a string of suitors including Spectator contributor Simon Hoggart (with a long career at the Guardian) and Labor politician David Blunkett, who resigned as minister of the Interior. in 2004, when it emerged that he had expedited her nanny’s visa application. Another columnist had a sexual relationship with the magazine’s receptionist.

Evans’ 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 tricks – sometimes breathlessly reported in the now defunct red tabloid newspaper News of the World – led to the magazine being nicknamed The Sextator.

Professor Ypi attended 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 reviews

Professor Ypi at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival in Oxford in March 2022

Evans wrote about visiting a massage parlor after seeing a lecture by Professor Ypi

Such was the public interest in these goings on that Evans co-wrote a West End farce, Who’s The Daddy?, about what happened. It was described at the time as ‘a lot of s****** in closets’. Evans’s own “sexcapade” with “Emma,” included in his novella, is equally priapic.

In her flat the couple have sex, described by Evans in robust and forensic detail. This sets the tone of the book. Much of it is not for the faint of heart.

“It hurt my tongue a little and lasted about five minutes,” he writes of a 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 smitten Evans and a real-life Emma. He subsequently married Celia Pilkington, archivist at London’s Inner Temple, although they have since separated.

In his fantasy, Evans wrote that after Emma he married a woman he described as “pragmatic, fun, unimaginative.” It remains a mystery why Evans, now single, published his book more than twenty years after the events it is about.

In his biography on Amazon – where his book is available – Evans writes that although he has “won awards as a poet and playwright” he “needs both money and prizes” – although, with around 140,000 on Amazon’s bestseller list, that’s unlikely he has made a lot of money from the royalties.

This weekend, Evans remains unrepentant about writing about his “crazy libido.” He told yesterday’s Daily Mail that his critics need to ‘get out of the cellar and take some action, even if you have to pay for it’.

A sentiment expressed in the opening pages of Sex Maniac: ‘What’s the point of being single if you can’t enjoy the wilder and more outrageous aspects of it?’