An odd mixture of older works, published without acknowledgement. This is a strange book, to some extent misleading to the unwary. Richard Manton is well known as an author of erotic fiction of the flagellatory sub-genre (M/F flavour), and his work often casts a somewhat wistful eye on the prolific equivalent literature from around the start of the twentieth century. However, this volume goes beyond pastiche. The first seven chapters of it appear to be a direct reprint of ‘The Memoirs of Dolly Morton’, a book published a hundred years ago which is very well known as a fine example of the genre. In that book, the chapters included here normally appear as Chapters 1-6, and 11; omission of 7-10 is not explained here. Spanking, etc. is most often portrayed in this genre as an activity that leads to more amorous exploits, and ‘Dolly Morton’ achieves an attractive balance in this respect. However, Manton’s selection omits the ‘juicier’ chapters; in fact the whole of this book is focussed on pain rather than pleasure. Following these chapters, the book describes a large number of punitive encounters with the hindquarters of girls with names such as Susan Webb, Helen Wong, and Miss Jolly. These names arise in other books, and although I wasn’t able to ascertain whether these parts were lifted’, in the manner of the ‘Dolly Morton’ chapters, one is left wondering whether these parts are in fact original; nowhere in this book is even the ‘Dolly Morton’ extraction acknowledged. It’s a reasonable book, as it stands, although it does suffer from being incoherent, and almost everything it contains gives the impression of being available in a better form elsewhere. ( )