Appignanesi's account of the evolution of marriage is particularly engrossing, and she offers some lively counterfactuals to our assumptions about olden-day attitudes.There is the Puritan marriage manual which urged "mutual dalliances for pleasure's sake"; the suggestion that "the ideal of companionate marriage came early because of the shift in sexual power", ushered in by the English Civil War. Across the channel, the land of liberté was far less  attendant to women's rights than the French would have us believe. In 1804, Napoleon introduced the Code Bonaparte, proclaiming that married women owed submission "to the man who is to become the arbiter of their fate". Queen Victoria, meanwhile, snug and smug in her own domestic idyll, was baffled by the suffragettes' cries for gender equality: "[I am] most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women's Rights' ... Lady X ought to get a GOOD WHIPPING."

With a quick costume change, cultural history becomes self-help, and Appignanesi's book is sprinkled with her own sage observations. "In the current culture where the sex industry is rampant, marital love gets infused with a worth ethic". Later, in an exhausting analysis of the struggles of 21st-century child-rearing, she makes the same point about parenting. Losing sight of the joy of love, be it erotic or familial, we can find ourselves locked in a violent embrace with its "shadow side", hate. 

Like May, Appignanesi over-emphasises the experiences of one gender at the expense of another. Yet despite her evidently feminist sympathies, she recognises that our embryonic attitudes to active fatherhood can't just be blamed on the dreaded patriarchy. Critiquing the feminist-backed American care model of motherhood, popular in the 1980s, Appignanesi believes it "locks men out of the pleasures of the nursery while liberating them from the burden of care". If only Nick Clegg could put it so boldly, he might have half a progressive policy on shared parenting.

Yet despite the not-so-ulterior political motive, Appignanesi's effective weaving of lit crit with social history, psychology with memoir, makes this giddy paean a summer-reading pleasure.