Why women fantasise about sheikhs

In celebration of its 110th birthday, I downloaded a Mills & Boon — The Greek Tycoon’s Blackmailed Mistress — and plan this coming weekend to settle down for an evening in the company of Dr Ella Smithson and Aristandros Xenakis, ‘an arrestingly handsome man… the epitome of lithe, masculine grace teamed with the high-voltage buzz of raw sexual energy’.

I’m fond of Mills & Boon. In the mid-1980s, they provided me with the sex education my otherwise excellent mother must have thought school would sort out. I stole them from my older cousins’ bookshelves, hid them under my jumper and ran home to read them behind the sofa, agog at what grown-ups got up to. Three decades later, I’ll raise a glass to them on their birthday, because I suspect no one else will.

Back in the autumn of 2008 there was a great Mills & Boon birthday fanfare. The papers were full of nostalgic pieces and the BBC commissioned a raunchy special — Consuming Passion — set in the original Mills & Boon office. But a lot has changed in ten years, and even if this was its centenary year, I don’t expect there’d be much fuss. The Mills & Boon phenomenon is just too disturbing for 2018. The Greek Tycoon’s Blackmailed Mistress is an all-time bestseller but hot on its heels comes The Millionaire’s Misbehaving Mistress, The Sheikh’s Love-Child and the ‘Desert Rogues’ collection, which includes The Sheikh and the Bride Who Said No. At a time in which Mohammed bin Salman and The Donald are the West’s arch-baddies, it’s just too weird that women fantasise about tycoons and desert rogues.