IF YOU MUST DO FILTH: 'Desires: 100 of Literature's Sexiest Stories' chosen by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review (Head of Zeus). Given porn's ubiquity, what's the point of another erotica anthology? It's a question Frostrup tackles in the introduction to this rather highbrow collection of smut. "With real sex in every manifestation available at the click of a mouse on the World Wide Web," she writes, "who would bother reading (itself considered a prehistoric activity in some quarters) fictional descriptions of other people's sexual adventures? Perhaps I'm just one of a tiny minority; for me it's rather like asking if you have real sex, why you'd bother wasting your thoughts on sexual fantasies?"Quite. So here we have contributions on severe mistresses, naughty maids, handsome gardeners, lusty wenches and disarming strangers from seemingly everyone, including the Marquis de Sade, Anais Nin, Rudyard Kipling, DH Lawrence, James Joyce, Angela Carter, Henry Miller, Roald Dahl, Ann Rice and a bunch of shameless new authors going boldly where others fear to tread. At 800 pages, it's hefty, but it is available digitally. It's also available as three separate volumes for Kindle: Awakening Desire, Burning Desire and Darkest Desire. Buying them separately is weirdly cheaper than buying the bumper collection.And reading this stuff is probably best on a tablet anyway. As Frostrup notes, "In the course of editing this anthology I've become quite adept at reading graphic sex in the company of total strangers and leaving them none the wiser. It's quite a challenge to keep your expression neutral, commuting on Great Western Railways, reading about an eight inch 'succubus' pleasuring his power-dressing corporate mistress." The mind boggles.THE ISSUEAnd speaking of comings and goings, Mary S Lovell's entertaining history, The Riviera Set 1920-1960: The Golden Years of Glamour and Excess (Little, Brown) is full of it - and it apparently all went down at one art deco pile outside Cannes belonging to an American showgirl turned European grande dame, Maxine Elliott. Over the years, guests at her Chateau de l'Horizon included Winston Churchill, Rita Hayworth, Prince Aly Khan, Doris Castlerosse, Coco Chanel, and F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Today the chateau is owned by a member of the Saudi royal family. The Riviera, as Somerset Maugham put it, continues to be "a sunny place for shady people".CRASH COURSEThough aimed at a UK audience, DJ Taylor's The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery (Constable), should have some local interest, being a guide to those crashing bores we all know: the political snob, the property snob, the literary snob, the popular culture snob, the food snob, the working-class snob, and so on.Now, if someone could put something together on the whiteness studies snob.THE BOTTOM LINE"He doesn't drink, he practically eats only vegetables, and he doesn't touch women!" - Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler (Allen Lane)..