KIMBERLY QUINN is one of those few women who know instinctively what most of her sex spend all their lives failing to discover: that men aren’t so superficial that they fall helplessly at the feet of beauty. Oh no. Men are far more superficial than that. They fall helplessly in the face of flattery.

A beauty, as Quinn’s fellow American Adlai Stevenson once observed, is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you — and anyone who has spent time in Quinn’s company comes away with enough of her rapt attention to sustain a man for days.

Her great gift to men is that she notices them and the characteristic that men prize above all else in women — above beauty, intelligence and an independent income — is the ability to make them feel like the centre of her universe. If only Bridget Jones had figured this out in her first film, we wouldn’t all have had to suffer with her at The Edge of Reason.

“When you sit next to her at dinner,” says one woman who has met Quinn two or three times, “she really does make you feel that she is interested in you and what you have to say. She’s not one of those people constantly looking over your shoulder for somebody more interesting.”

Or, at least, not obviously.

Historically, men have always been the great seducers and, frankly, it’s always been a bit of a chore. These days, it’s also a bit of a dangerous game to play — seduction is, after all, the art of getting someone to do what they don’t want to do — and one doesn’t have to be desperately right-on to see the point of Andrea Dworkin’s remark that the only thing that distinguishes rape and seduction is that in seduction the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

In this atmosphere, what a relief when a woman makes the moves (and buys the booze). And if she happens to be charming and attentive, laughs at your weak jokes and is a bit of a looker to boot — well, happy days.

The extent of Quinn’s prowess as a seductress is underlined by the fact that she is, to be honest, only a bit of a looker. Yes, she doesn’t look her age and dresses well, or at least expensively — Chanel, Hermès bags and so on — but no better than one would expect of a woman in her position. This isn’t a woman who turns heads. Such looks as she has she owes to her mother, Lugene Sanders, the classically pouting blonde star of the 1950s American TV show The Life of Riley. This was a classical, physical seductress, the type who really could drop a man’s pants at 20 paces with a flutter of her eyelashes.

Interestingly, however, it seems she never did: this year she and Marvin Solomon celebrated 50 years of marriage (it seems unlikely that their daughter and the much-suffering Stephen Quinn will follow suit). Perhaps Kimberly’s skills of seduction flowered in the shadow of her mother’s beauty. And right now her mother won’t be alone among Americans of her generation in recalling the catchline of her show’s on-screen husband: “What a revoltin’ development this is!” Few men can resist flattery from a woman, especially an intelligent, bright, vivacious, well-educated women who still manages to find something endlessly fascinating and amusing about whichever male she finds in her sights.

And women like this are dangerous — not just because of their Siren-like lure but because they rarely mean it. Like the white-suited shipboard lothario who finds every heiress he encounters on the prom deck bewitching until he finally finds one who agrees to dance with him, the fatally attentive femme has no control over her indiscriminating death ray: it is either on (generally whenever awake), or it is off (generally only when unconscious).

Look how David Blunkett “misunderstood that someone could do this . . . to me”. Easy, perhaps, to see how a single man like Blunkett — Home Secretary, it is true, but still at root a man from a humble, working-class background — could fall for a line as cheesy as “I have often wondered what it would be like to sleep with a blind man” (now, of course, she knows).

But what about the Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart? This is a man who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to be lacking in self esteem. His denial on Sunday that he had been anything more than friends with Quinn included the less than self-deprecating remark: “She probably said nice things about me, ‘He is witty and amusing, and a good writer’.” Hoggart is no oil painting, but equally obviously he is not struggling with his sense of self-worth. And yet he, too, it seems, was instantly captivated by a spot of fluent-tongued flattery.