Its touching, men never stop carrying on about sex

By Celia Walden 649AM GMT nineteen March 2010

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Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Woody Allen on the set of Vicky Cristina Barcelona Photo Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I find it both exasperating and inspiring that men never grow out of sex. I don"t meant the action itself that would be unhappy but articulate about it, intellectualising it and all the time endowing it with supernatural, universe-defining powers. Nowhere is this bent some-more strong than in Martin Amis"s new book, The Pregnant Widow; each page of it is jam-packed with nubile breasts, oversized bum and the philosophical attribute in between nubile breasts and oversized buttocks.

This is consciously excessive, it"s true. Keith Nearing, Amis"s illusory change ego, is seeking behind on the pheromone snowstorm of his early twenties privately one summer outlayed in an Italian palace with a statuesque blonde declared Sheherazade, whose ""monokini"" exercises a chief potential on the immature men around the swimming pool. The essay is brilliant, but similar to Bertolucci"s movie Stealing Beauty, Howard Jacobson"s novel The Act of Love, Woody Allen"s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (the one in that Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson kiss), and each book Philip Roth has ever created about college professors, it"s tough to shake up off the sense that the prime masculine liar has been held up in an indecorous hitch of teenage self-titillation.

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The French are lustful of intellectualising sex (the cocktail reflective thinker Bernard-Henri Lvy destined Day and Night - a movie about an oversexed reflective thinker starring Levy"s own, perma-naked singer mother Arielle Dombasle) but we Brits some-more righteous by inlet do it in a opposite way; the brain methodical tinge maybe portion to lessen the guilt.

Still the sex thing goes from uninteresting to in contact with when you realize how closely firm up it is with men"s fright of death, that Amis creates transparent in the book. Female strength creates them feel immortal. "The thing about us men," a crony once confessed, "is that we feel as beholden and disbelieving to be authorised to hold a lady at 60 as we do at 16."

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Some of those glitzy Los Angeles pads aren"t built for comfort. Simon Cowell"s, however (all blocks and portholes, usually similar to the attainment of design in Jacques Tati"s Mon Oncle), isn"t utterly as antagonistic as you competence think. Inside, the monotone palace is neat and luxurious. At a cooking celebration thrown by the pirate nobleman of being TV last week, I was handed a black cashmere carpet to keep me comfortable and served a play of handcrafted spaghetti bolognese by the flame-lit, black line-up pool. Our host, meanwhile, presided in a Noël Coward-like floor-length black robe. Sated, mollycoddled and volatile with wine, the handful of guest took their leave around midnight, usually to one by one tumble face-down on the forecourt. The reason? An dark two-foot dump outward the front doorway designed, I can usually assume, to remind us all that once you"re outside, the world"s a oppressive place.

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Extraordinary scenes at Sky News domicile on Sunday morning. "Alistair Darling," the make-up artist quivered, "is on his way. We"ve been arguing all sunrise about that one of us gets to understanding with the eyebrows." Loitering outward the immature room, the exemplary boyband Blake craned their necks for a sighting of the Chancellor. For such a citadel of serenity, Alistair Darling doesn"t half set people aflutter. When he did arrive, he done Jacob Zuma"s acquire progressing this month see small time. Unbowed notwithstanding carrying one of the majority fatiguing jobs in open use the Chancellor sauntered past, that majestically stationary physiognomy not betraying an unit of emotion. Unlike so most others in his trade, he is not a man to abase prior to the masses. It was usually when the Blake boys proposed up a peaceful barbershop give up of "Mr Darling… give me a dream…" that I thought I saw the spook of a smile.