Reader, I’d marry him.⁂ Please note, the description of this lot has changed ⁂ He’s imbued with a social conscience, sees the heroine as an equal rather than a commodity to be conquered and possessed, and manages to do all this in a pair of pleasingly tight breeches without banging on about his feelings all the time.

From 1945, when Winston Graham first published Ross Poldark, to the first TV dramatisation in the 70s, when apparently vicars had to change the times of evensong because the pews were empty of parishioners who needed their Poldark fix, he is a hero for any age. So it’s no surprise that Poldark’s appeal had endured. He’s part alpha male, part metrosexual all combined into one HD-ready, smouldering package Now, do one!” It’s certainly not pistols at dawn. Certainly not in the gyms of Essex where the primped, preened, waxed and fake-baked male cast of Towie argue about who is the most alpha of them all, then fight in tacky nightclubs at themed parties. Sadly, in real life a well-rounded alpha male is hard to find.

Their heroines have backbone, their heroes aren’t autocratic arseholes, and any bodice-ripping is entirely consensual. It harks back to the days when steamy bodice-rippers featured brutish heroes and love scenes that bordered on rape – the kind of romances that have long fallen out of favour with the readers of romantic historical fiction, who now prefer the more considered and contemporary novels of writers like Courtney Milan, Stephanie Laurens and Elizabeth Hoyt. There’s something incredibly reductive and old-fashioned about the pumped-up posturing of the BDSM-lite billionaire. Even more disturbing is that Jamie Dornan looked sexier playing a serial killer in The Fall than he ever did when he was getting down to some sexy slapping in the Red Room. He may be suited and booted, but in the box office-busting adaptation of Fifty Shades Of Grey, with every extraneous hair felled from his body, Grey looks disturbingly pre-pubescent for a tortured torturer. Grey’s deep inner turmoil comes from the kind of mummy issues so basic that even a GCSE psychology student would roll their eyes at them. Now, compare Poldark to that other romantic hero of our age, Christian Grey. Sunday night fever: Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice Photograph: Guardian

Ross poldark first edition