“Sex and Art are the same thing,” declared Pablo Picasso; this was one of the greatest chat-up lines ever, from a master of the art.

Finally, a scientific survey has proven what everyone has long suspected (which is what scientific surveys ought to do): creative artists, it appears, really do have more exotic love lives than the rest of the population. The new study, published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society, suggests that artists, from poets to painters to puppeteers, have, on average, twice as many sexual partners as non-artists.

Read the rest of this article by Ben Macintyre in the London Times online.