One of my favorite authors of all time, Roald Dahl, was a spy attached to the British embassy in D.C. for a while during World War II.

I can’t quite gather what his official assignment was, but he apparently cut a swath through the grand dames of Washington society, and his superiors liked it like that.

Drawing on previously unpublished letters and other documents, American journalist Jennet Conant has written about Dahl’s numerous sexual conquests.

They include Millicent Rogers, the heiress to a Standard Oil fortune, and Clare Boothe Luce, a right-wing congresswoman and the wife of the publisher of Time magazine.

Boothe Luce proved so frisky, Dahl later claimed to have begged his superiors to take him off the assignment, only to be told to get back into the bedroom. […]

Antoinette Marsh Haskell, the daughter of Marsh, explained that with Dahl’s status came a string of women.

She said: “Girls just fell at Roald’s feet.

“I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that [was worth] more than $50,000 a year.”

Another biographer actually described him as “one of the biggest cocksmen in America”. Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. James and the Giant Peach.

Oh shit. Now every title of his oeuvre sounds kinky to me. 😮