Widow, greatly interested in discipline  Stephen Moss reads
between the lines of the small ads  I assume HG Cocks exists.
His name seems almost too good to be true, for an author who to
date has written histories of modern sexuality, Victorian
sexuality and now personal columns. When it comes to sex, Cocks
is everywhere.  Classified is a slender book, somewhat distended
to make even this length. Size isn't everything, of course, but
it reflects an uncertainty about the project; Cocks includes 20
pages of footnotes but then in the acknowledgments apologises
for not making his effort "33% funnier". Is it history or
humour? In the end, it isn't quite either, though many of the
ads themselves - and the code you have to crack to understand
them - are funny, and Cocks's analysis, though sometimes
meandering, is suitably suggestive.  In a brief preface, Cocks
traces matrimonial ads back to the 1690s. By the middle of the
18th century the market was booming, and he quotes a splendid
example from 1750, from a "Gentlem