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Martin Amis never had much success with the opposite sex as a teenager.
He and his brother Philip tore pages out of their exercise books and fashioned them into neat squares the size of calling cards, on which they wrote their names and telephone numbers, and distributed them at bus stops and on Tube trains, handing out thousands to any female who caught their eye.
Then they went home and waited for the phone to ring. They reckoned for every 2,000 leaflets they dished out, they received three calls. History does not relate whether the brothers ever closed a deal.
But now one of Amis's old girlfriends Julie Kavanagh has written an article, with his consent, for Intelligent Life, a quarterly magazine, which documents his transformation from an insecure "short-arsed" young man into a ladykiller with "Byronic magnetism", following the publication of his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973.
The 21-year-old Kavanagh embarked on an affair with the author in the Seventies after profiling "London's newest novelist" for Women's Wear Daily.
She was seriously smitten - "the Jagger lips, moody monobrow and fag between two fingers exactly fitted the image I'd formed of a coldly alluring Martin Amis". He was "as witty and ironic as Charles Highway [the hero of the Rachel Papers], but small, very small, and sweetly affectionate - even sentimental".
The pair began a relationship which was to last over the course of three years, peppered with his infidelity and ultimately betrayal.
The extraordinary memoir was published today to pre-empt his new book Untitled Stories, to be published next January, which Amis has described as "blindingly autobiographical".
Ms Kavanagh, the half-sister of Pat Kavanagh, the agent, details how as a young journalist she was part of Amis's life of drinking with Christopher Hitchens and key figures in the literary scene.
And she tells of the encounters Amis, whom she nicknamed "Little Shit" , enjoyed with a series of women.
In one anecdote she relates how she looked under the table at a dinner party for a missing fork to see Amis and the critic Lorna Sage "doing more than sitting side by side".
There was the appearance of a flirtation with Claire Tomalin, then Amis's boss at the New Statesman. And there is the affair with Lamorna Seale which gave Amis the daughter, Delilah, whom he did not acknowledge till she was 18. Amis went off with married Seale, "only to return to me with his mouth smothered in lipstick" writes Kavanagh.
She goes on to document Amis's later affairs with a succession of women including Emma Soames, the grand-daughter of Winston Churchill.
Amis has always been sensitive about his private life but in recent years he has become more candid about his romantic conquests.
In 2007, he revealed that it was Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who made him the man he is today and he credited her with transforming him into a literary Mick Jagger.
The romance began when he was 23 and she was a 19-year-old undergraduate at St Anne's College, Oxford. "She was and is adorable," he said.
Amis was the son of Lucky Jim author Kingsley Amis and had graduated with a First in English from Exeter College, Oxford. After Brown, he went on to squire some of the most eligible women of his generation.
Shared experience - the novelist's close circle
Lamorna Seale
Married British artist and author with whom Amis began an affair. “At the party where I first exchanged whispers with Lamorna Seale the attraction was so immediate that we disappeared into some unattended shadows,” he wrote in Experience. She became pregnant but did not tell him her daughter Delilah was his although two years later she sent a picture in which Amis saw a resemblance. Hanged herself in 1978.
Delilah Seale
Learned Amis was her father on the night of her A-level results when journalist Patrick Seale, who had brought her up, broke the news over dinner. “I cried and cried,” she wrote. Met Amis a year later after exchanging letters in which he told how he had decided not to be part of her life. Now a 33-year-old television producer living in west London.
Christopher Hitchens
Amis's closest friend and “foil”, so much so that they shared a made-up language, with “rig” meaning penis and “sock” for house, and spent every Friday at literary lunches with Clive James and Julian Barnes. Uncannily like Amis, he was at the centre of a Left-wing scene in the 1970s. Now a polemicist in the US who has flirted with neo-conservatism.
Claire Tomalin
Literary editor of the New Statesman at the time of Kavanagh's memoir. Amis was her assistant. Despite being 16 years his senior, there appeared to be a frisson with a friend spotting his “innocent gigolo eyes and an air of candid arrivisme” when he saw them having lunch. She subsequently married playwright Michael Frayn.
Emma Soames
The grand-daughter of Winston Churchill was briefly entwined with Amis. Their affair began over games of backgammon. She later edited Tatler, ES Magazine and the Telegraph Magazine. Now 59-year-old editor-at-large of Saga magazine.
Lorna SageProminent book reviewer with a walk-on part in the London literary demi-monde thanks to post at University of East Anglia. Was “doing more than sitting side by side” with Amis at a Charlotte Street dinner party. Died of emphysema in 2001 aged 58.
