The French, for some reason – but why not? – love writing about love. Think of Barthes's Fragments d'un discours amoureux, or a great deal of Lacan's oeuvre. One should be careful here. I know someone who was dumped not long after giving his girlfriend the former, and as for the latter, bear in mind that our most prominent contemporary Lacanian, Slavoj Žižek, glossed one of his mentor's remarks on the subject thus: "Love is giving something you don't have – to someone who doesn't want it." This, though, is rather older, and is more likely to be appreciated when given, prettily wrapped, to the object of your devotion, perhaps with suitable passages highlighted, on Valentine's day.

And the beauty of it is that either gender can appreciate it. Audaciously but sensitively, a great deal of time is spent on the woman's perspective rather than the man's. "In mannered love, and perhaps in the first five minutes of passionate love, a woman taking a lover pays more attention to the way other women see him than to how she herself sees him." I tried this out on a woman, though, and she doubted it was the case – but then do remember this was written nearly 200 years ago, and they did things differently then. (Note that word "mannered".) On Love is set in a world in which it's hard enough to get to hold hands with your lover, let alone a bit of the Other.