The dubious doctor recounts the saga of another overrated, pseudo-intellectual, sexual deviant French writer whose well-known pedophilia (child molestation) has finally been attacked by his former admirers among the fickle, amoral French “intellectuals.”

I have little sympathy with Matzneff either as a writer or as a man. Of course, I have read only a tiny fraction of his oeuvre, but he strikes me, quite apart from his morals, as a bad writer, self-indulgent, self-centred and self-important, in a word boring. Perhaps libertines always are boring.

But this is not my point. In the 1970s, many eminent French intellectuals such as Sartre and Foucault were supporters of paedophilia and argued publicly for the abolition of laws against it.