If your romantic fancy leans toward serial embezzlers, self-harming flautists or beardy physicists known as Naughty Lola then you should advertise for a mate in Europe’s biggest-selling literary review magazine.

The venerable London Review of Books has published a compendium of the weirdest and funniest advertisements from the eccentric readers who write to its personals column seeking love, sex or simply correspondence with like-minded people.

Long seen as cold fish compared to the torrid Latin lovers of Italy and France, the book, titled “They Call Me Naughty Lola”, shows that Britons are not all stiff-upper lip with this collection from the world’s strangest lonely hearts section.

The personals column is the creation of London Review of Books advertising director David Rose (M, 32, married) who also edited “They Call Me Naughty Lola”.

Surrounded by a colorful mix of contributors, subscribers and London eccentrics at a party to launch the book, Rose said he started the personals column in 1998, imagining a genuine lonely hearts section for the sensitive and erudite.

Then his first submission arrived.

“67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur picking my toothless way through the urban sprawl, self-destructive, sliding toward pathos, jacked up on Viagra and on the lookout for a contortionist who plays the trumpet.”

Rose held out for serious submissions but to no avail. Eventually he succumbed to the column becoming a notice board for the strange, hilarious and downright bizarre.

“It became very clear very quickly that it was going to be very silly.”

My personal favorite from the article:

Susan Wolfe, (F, 60, but looks much younger) says she wrote an “embarrassing number of ads”, but has now stopped.

So far she’s had responses from a serial killer in a U.S. prison, an “infection-free” pensioner and a date with a cross-dresser who took her shopping to find himself a gold lame miniskirt and a union jack thong before lunch at a rundown Chinese restaurant on her 60th birthday.