KEY POINTS:
There's a scene in the film Sex and the City that has sent its mostly female fans crowding into bookshops, only to emerge empty-handed.
Carrie Bradshaw is lying in bed next to her lover, Mr Big, reading extracts from an interesting-looking tome called Love Letters Of Great Men.
But, although the quotations Carrie read out were real, the book itself does not exist, much to the exasperation of booksellers inundated by would-be customers.
But now, British publisher Macmillan is plugging the gap by issuing a new book with the same title as the fictitious one that intrigued Carrie. It has the same wide choice of historical figures, including Henry VIII, Napoleon and Oscar Wilde.
You can also dip into letters from poet John Keats, who died young and didn't always get on well with women. In fact, he once complained in a letter to a male friend: "When I am among women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen - I cannot speak or be silent ... I am in a hurry to be gone."
Many years after Keats died, the Times newspaper carried the bland obituary of a 65-year-old woman, Mrs Fanny Lindon. You cannot blame its writer for not knowing who she was, because she had kept the secret even from her husband.
She was Fanny Brawne, the lover who had befriended Keats when he was penniless and become his inspiration.
After his death, she watched his reputation grow while she kept his love letters stashed away. In one he wrote: "I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel."
Another featured poet is the infamous Lord Byron, who was the nearest 19th century equivalent to a rock star. He had a fling with married Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously warned that he was "mad, bad and dangerous to know" - a warning ignored by teenager Teresa, Countess Guiccioli.
Teresa was married to a man 40 years her senior who met Byron in Italy and he became the love of his life.
"My destiny rests with you," Byron told her in one of his letters. "And you are a woman, 17 years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish you had stayed there, with all my heart ... But all this is too late.
"I love you, and you love me - at least you say you do so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation at all events."
- INDEPENDENT
