The History of Sex
(But Not As We Know It)

But John's unimpressed. One woman in particular is an affront to his aesthetics: a blonde with collagen injections and perfectly forme...

'Well, how was it?' my ' friend ' leers afterwards, sitting alone in the bar. (Martina's off screwing another john.) ...

After collecting a towel at the bar, Linda leads me down a dark passageway past the beach hut, another Christmas tree and the fake fireplace...

Determined to pimp me, in effect, he asks me to pick the hottest whores in the joint. I nod towards a sultry pair who look like they don...

Noting my discomfort, John reckons we should double back to a place called Sweet Paradise, yet another oasis of kitsch in a concrete desert,...

Our next stop is a suburban house-turned-brothel that's owned by Russians and run by a sour Romanian. 'It's interesting what t...

Tramping off to another club, I ask him why Czech women get into prostitution. 'Lazy!' he snorts. 'Most of them are just plain...

Which is probably true. But many of his other observations are far more controversial. 'I come from the Land of Ugly Women ,' he...

To keep a safe distance, one of John's ideas is to set himself up as a 'broker'—the respectable term for pimp, I believe—caterin...

As a middleman of minge, then, John aims to ensure that other foreign johns don't get fleeced. Although this might seem like a cunny p...

Aptly enough, my guide goes by the nom de screw of 'John.' With the face of a pug and the body of a bulldog, he could be any natio...

Having thrived during the free-market boom of democracy, the Czech sex industry is now experiencing the cut-throat side of capitalism: a mar...

At present, though, you could be forgiven for mistaking the modern ' heart of Europe ' for its throbbing groin. The Czech Republic...

For the most part, the protests against the invasion were fatality-free. A unique eyewitness account comes from a sex writer who toured Cz...

In late twentieth-century Prague, Bittman says, sexpionage was conducted on a case-by-case basis using known prostitutes. The women's...

Against this backdrop, the Czechs used every dirty trick in the book—inventing many of their own along the way. In one year, 25 of their o...

For straight targets, the most sinister honeytraps involved being framed for rape and threatened with life in a Soviet jail. After Verkhon...

The tale of Claude put a positive spin on the real-life story of John Vassall, one of Britain's infamous Cold War traitors. Lewis reck...

If the KGB's swallows occasionally found their work hard to—well, you know—then pity the poor ravens. A defector called Dimitri Labyav...