The pick-up artists who seduced a country

Many years ago, when I was a mere slip of a features journalist, I spent a weekend learning how to be a pick-up artist. Amazing. You assume it won’t work, that sort of thing, but it totally did. Towards the end of the second night, having not said an unscripted word in about half an hour, I found myself in the VIP room of a London nightclub, being gazed at in rapt adoration by a wildly attractive twentysomething blonde. Seriously, people don’t normally look at me like that. It was special. And then I ran away, terrified, because I had a girlfriend.

My guide through all this was a man called Neil Strauss, author of a book called The Game. It attracted a lot of hate, The Game, and deservedly because in many respects it was effectively a manual for tricking unsuspecting drunk women into wrongly believing they wanted to have sex with you.