'He was looking at her with fierce burning eyes that swept her until she felt that the boyish clothes that covered her slender limbs were stripped from her'.

The Sheik - to become notorious as Rudolph Valentino's greatest screen role - is an astonishing and touchingly artless expression of female sexual masochism. One of Virago's trio of turn-of-the-century erotic bestsellers - along with Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks and Ethel M. Dell's The Way of an Eagle, its willful heroine, is kidnapped and subjugated by the cruel but strangely compelling Sheik Ahmed who, it emerges, is not all that he seems.