This one had me fooled - the tone of the pervy old buffer reflecting on a life devoted to the pursuit of the perfect posterior is established so well, and the detail of Britain in the sixties and seventies is so exact, that I was googling for images of the magazine "Julius" was involved with. Allowing for a certain amount of braggadocio and the occasional tall tale from a surely unreliable narrator, it is all quite plausible. There WAS a little spanking magazine called "Derriere" in the seventies, and I'm still wondering about the British psychedelic LP cover Mr. Culdrose is supposed to have adorned with Victorian spanking images. I'd love for that to exist, and would pay a collector's price for a copy. But, as m'learned colleague here advises, the fine hands of Aisling Morgan and Penny Birch are recognisable behind this elaborate and (mostly) delightful hoax. (I dock it a star for veering into a particular preoccupation of Ms. Birch that I happen to find distasteful, though it could be argued that this comes with the territory.) ( )

This one could have been named 'The Memoirs of a Dirty Old Man', as it's the recollections of one man's sexual life and how it revolved around the female posterior. Beginning just after the second World War, when he discovers his fetish, he details all of his successful and failed relationships, his business triumphs(founding a magazine titled Derriere) and failures(a rump-themed bar/restaurant), up through the decades to the 00's. He also details his philosophy on all kinds of kink and offers advice on how to achieve your goals with certain fetishes.

On the back of the book it says this about the author: "Julius Culdrose is the pseudonym of an Oxbridge educated author and wine expert, who is also responsible for over sixty published novels, and is an active participant in British spanking and pony girl clubs, as well as being an absolute authority on the female bottom." This book was actually written by Aishling Morgan and Penny Birch, who I must say did a fine job. This is the first of the new 'Nexus Enthusiast' line of books which are devoted to one fetish per book. They also wrote the forthcoming Busty, by Tom King.

I went in not knowing what to expect from this book but found myself pleasantly surprised that it went into detail about other aspects of his life other than just the smutty parts. Sex and plot are balanced quite nicely. Highly recommended. And it has a great cover too! ( )

This book is the autobiography of the man – a thorough-going enthusiast of the female bottom - who is responsible for starting the bottom-worshipper’s magazine Derrière. Now in his sixties (and still going strong), he recounts the origins of his adoration, and traces its development, including his brushes with the law, to the present day. The early pages read like an erotic novel, and the book only slowly turns towards the ‘standard’ narrative style of biography. His early encounters, indeed, are highly commendable to aficionados of M/F spanking literature, and it is interesting that the feeling of dull repetition one has by the end is similar to the feeling one has at the end of the average ‘Victorian’ spanking novel, of jaded boredom. Nevertheless, the book is a very interesting, and probably reliable, testament to the public emergence of erotic literature in Britain during the second half of the Twentieth Century. Spanking itself plays an inescapable, if minor, part of the author’s predilections, forming a balance contribution to all of those other practices which men find irresistible when confronted with a well-rounded derrière. ( )