A great collection of male chauvinistic quotes from history. David Olive’s compendium documents how men use to be men, male chauvinism as vintage verbal Viagra to pump up the male ego. Not only do men – as early as Pythagoras and Plato – dish out politically incorrect pronouncements on the weaker sex, but women join in on the fun as well! Critics and grumpy activists will undoubtedly howl murder at some of the choice lines presented here, but the truth about quotations is that they are often taken out of context.

For example, a line from Noel Coward “women should be struck regularly, like gongs,” should not be taken with the same gravity as one from someone like Clare Booth Luce: “A woman’s best protection is – the right man” or Martin Luther: “Eloquence in women shouldn’t be praised; it is more fitting for them to lisp and stammer.” The author’s obvious agenda is to indict the subterranean legion of men – and their sometimes female accomplices – as chauvinist pigs, and to show that we have indeed come a long way to an “enlightened society,” but look around you at the limp-wristed, tree-hugging, PC men of today? Where’s the fire? Where’s the savagery that is the stuff of bodice-ripper romance novels, a staple to so many women’s sexual imagination?

No. Women worship men and have always wanted our men to be men, and today’s males need to turn back the clock and consult this codex, because when all things are equal and ideally egalitarian, electricity and magnetism wanes.

Give me Marike de Klerk’s (wife of South African president F.W. de Klerk) “We are unimportant. We are here to serve, heal wounds, and to give love,” or Napolean’s “they are our property, we are not theirs…They belong belong to us.” Even Michael Caine’s “if you can break them in, they are very grateful, as all women are,” are utterances that drive some of us dizzy and as Barbara Amiel so aptly puts it, “sends a shiver of subservience on the part of those who approach it.”