“Perhaps only someone from Britain could genuinely believe that a personal ad beginning, ‘Baste me in butter and call me Slappy,’ might lead to romance with an actual, nonincarcerated person. But in the strange alternate universe that is the personals column in the London Review of Books, a fetish for even the naughtiest dairy product is considered a perfectly reasonable basis for a relationship. Rejecting the earnest self-promotion of most personal ads, the correspondents in the London Review column tend instead to present themselves as idiosyncratic, even actively repellent.”