So, Faria, what attracted you to the millionaire Mr Eriksson?

Balding with dodgy teeth and elevated shoes, Sven is the latest in a long line of unlikely Lotharios. Adrian Turpin sifts yesterday's interviews, and other cases, to predict what might come next

Still the ice man, but a 'Master of Love' too: Sven Goran Eriksson

Still the ice man, but a 'Master of Love' too: Sven Goran Eriksson

Let's face it, there have always been doubts about the England manager's relationship with Ulrika Jonsson. The revelation that he left his Cuban heels outside Ulrika's bedroom door to tell the nanny to keep out hardly said Casanova, but after yesterday's revelations we must reconsider ...

SACK RECORD: The new Sven - or as we will now refer to him, following The Mail on Sunday's lead, Sven: Master of Love (SMoL) - is less Ikea and more Ann Summers. Yes, the ice man is still there: the News of the World claims he cleared the dinner table and stacked the dishwasher before sleeping with Faria Alam for the first time. (He also insisted on putting on his cotton pyjamas before joining her in bed.)

"At teatime," Ms Alam claimed, "he offered to give me a tour of the house, which is huge, and we ended up making love on the stairs ... He pulled me back to him and tore off my jeans. It was incredibly erotic and very quick, but we both enjoyed it. He was so forceful I grazed my knees. He was very nonchalant but I was taken back with desire."

His approach to the art of wooing inspires wonder: "You are a beautiful woman. When a man wants something he goes and gets it. I want you." The Independent's lawyers have asked us to point out that the newspaper will accept no liability if you try this "route one" approach after seven pints of lager and a couple of vodka tonics.

TATTLE FACTOR: Yesterday the MoS boasted "Amazing revelations and more exclusive pictures ...", while the NoW offered "Full exclusive interview ..." - and that was in Scotland.

CAREER CONSEQUENCES: If SMoL's talent to improvise on stairs could be brought to the pitch, England might just have a chance at the 2006 World Cup.

300 conquests - and a lifelong friendship with Peter Stringfellow: Paul Daniels

"So," Mrs Merton asked Debbie McGee, "What first attracted you to short, balding, millionaire Paul Daniels?" Readers with strong stomachs may turn to Daniels' autobiography, Under No Illusions, to find out what was in it for him: "Once I got upstairs, Debbie was lying stark naked on the bed - eat your heart out, fellows! She was wearing the sort of sleeping blindfold you get on long-haul flights. Printed on it was Do Not Disturb. But further down she had a sign that said Disturb!"

SACK RECORD: Daniels claims to have slept with more than 300 women before marrying McGee, a soloist in the Iranian National Ballet when she became his assistant in 1979.

TATTLE FACTOR: Daniels' website, www.paul-daniels.co.uk, claims his philandering has been taken out of context. "This was over a very long time of being on the road on my own for years. I also said anyone doing that now would be insane, in view of the death sentence Aids hands out."

The same site added: "I have known Peter Stringfellow just about all my working life and he gave me one of my early bookings. He spotted us walking past the club and he invited us in to have a drink. Neither I nor Debbie spent a penny."

CAREER CONSEQUENCES: Has it harmed his career? Not a lot, but he obviously likes it.

The flashy, low-browed author of the 20th century's first bonkbuster: Frank Harris

A friend of George Bernard Shaw, Harris ran away to New York aged 15, and died in 1914. His best known legacy was the first great bonkbuster of the 20th-century, his autobiography, My Life and Lives. In between Michael Winner-ish quantities of namedropping, Harris recounted in some detail many of the hundreds of lovers that he claimed to have had. All the more remarkable since one contemporary, the critic, Hesketh Pearson, described him as an "undersized, low-browed, flashily dressed, ill-featured fellow".

SACK RECORD: So Harris would like us to think. "The next moment I began caressing her red ******** with my hot, stiff *****: Lorna sighed deeply once or twice and her eyes turned up." Harris repeats his kind of thing for 1,060 pages.

TATTLE FACTOR: The press could hardly expose him more than he exposed himself (quite literally in some cases). Society was less forgiving. "Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses - once," his friend Oscar Wilde observed.

CAREER CONSEQUENCES: My Life and Loves was banned as pornographic for 30 years in Britain and the US. Harris's reputation as a man of letters has been all but erased by his sexual gymnastics and tall story-telling.

Quiet one who 'knew what was coming': John Major

It's the quiet ones you have to watch. Edwina Currie will tell you: "John was not ordinary, he was remarkable."

SACK RECORD: Major's four-year affair with Currie, when they were ministers in Margaret Thatcher's government, came to light in 2002. History doesn't tell whether he really did tuck his shirt into his underpants.

TATTLE FACTOR: Poor John, must have known it was coming. Currie had already written a fictionalised account in A Parliamentary Affair. The final straw seem to have been Major's biography: "The most hurtful thing is ... that I wasn't even in the index," she complained.The affair made an interesting footnote to the Tories' 1993 "Back to Basics" campaign.

CAREER CONSEQUENCES: We'll never think of him as grey again. Indirectly responsible for propelling Currie onto the reality show Hell's Kitchen - justification by itself for a privacy law.

False alarm! He's no nuke between sheets: Homer Simpson

Balding, four-fingered and only slightly less yellow than Sven's teeth, the nuclear-power worker hardly promises to be radioactive beneath the sheets. Despite this, women seem drawn to him like flies to a pint of Duff Beer.

SACK RECORD: Barely avoided affair with country and western singing barmaid Lurleen Lumpkins (writer of "I'm Basting a Turkey with My Tears" and "Don't Look Up My Dress Unless You Mean It"). Also shared a hotel room at National Energy Convention with co-worker Mindy Simmons (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) and struggled to ignore a fortune cookie which said they would sleep together.

TATTLE FACTOR: Mud sticks. Homer was roasted by tabloid TV after being falsely accused of sexually assaulting a feminist babysitter. His reputation was restored by a videotape showing that he had been removing a squashed Gummi sweet from the seat of her pants.

CAREER CONSEQUENCES: Homer has bounced back more times than Peter Mandelson and Kevin Keegan put together.

Poet Larkin was far from averse to sex, but he kept affairs quiet: Philip Larkin

Towards the end of John Betjeman's life, he was asked by a television interviewer whether he had regrets. The avuncular poet paused briefly, possibly wistfully, possibly for dramatic effect, and replied: "Not enough sex."

And so it was with Philip Larkin, we thought. After all, this was the man who wrote: "Sexual intercourse began/ in nineteen-sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me)." Only when his letters were published after his death in 1985 did we realise how wrong we were.

SACK RECORD: For three decades, Larkin had parallel affairs with the English lecturer Monica Jones (savagely caricatured in Kingsley Amis's novel Lucky Jim) and Maeve Brennan, a fellow librarian at Hull University. he also found time to have an affair with his secretary Betty Mackareth and devote hours to his large stash of pornography.

TATTLE FACTOR: If the News of the World had a literary section Larkin would have made headlines. As it is, the revelations in Andrew Motion's biography and Anthony Thwaite's Selected Letters, caused a feeding frenzy among the chattering classes. The critic Tom Paulin said the poet's correspondence revealed "the sewer under the national monument Larkin became".

CAREER CONSEQUENCES: Well, he's dead, so he's not going to be writing much anyway. Larkin's reputation as one of Britain's greatest 20th-century poets remains secure. But students of English literature now also know he was well-endowed. And, somehow, I'm not sure he'd be unhappy with that.

The swarthy pioneer of blaming 'bewitching' power of women: Casanova

You thought the name was a giveaway? In fact, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was no oil painting, swarthy, 5ft 9ins and disfigured by the pox. Before squiring his way round Europe, he was expelled from a Venetian seminary for scandalous behaviour, and ended his career as a librarian (cf Philip Larkin).

Some credit him for inventing the condom. He did pioneer the classic sex-scandal defence: "The blame lies entirely with the female sex for bewitching his mind and enslaving his heart. Oh, seducing sex! Source of pain! Let a poor innocent person go in peace."

SACK RECORD: Casanova's biography (not published in full until the 1960s) lists 122 conquests. They include his daughter, Leonilda, whom he says he made pregnant.

TATTLE FACTOR: Casanova was smart enough to act as a police informer for the Venetian Inquisition (Spot the parallels with Colin Gibson spilling the beans on Sven to the News of the World in return for silence about Mark Palios?) Among books confiscated when he was arrested by the doge in 1755 was Arentino's treatise on sexual positions, The Joy of Sex of its day.

CAREER CONSEQUENCES: For some reason Casanova's autobiography has received more attention than his History of Unrest in Poland. The louche reputation didn't stop him moving to Paris and running the national lottery, which made him wealthy. Sven for Camelot, anyone?