I must begin this article, I feel, by apologising to every woman I have met over the past 48 hours. You, half of that couple in the Soho Hotel. You, that drunk, sobbing girl in the Sanderson lounge. You, those three model-esque waifs by that pillar in Soho’s Player bar and you, that bright-eyed young blonde in the VIP room of Mayfair’s Funky Buddha. You especially, actually. You quite liked me, I could tell.

I do not have a best friend with a jealous girlfriend. I do not have another friend with two new dogs, both of which he is keen to name after Eighties pop stars. At no point, in all honesty, did I ever “need a female opinion” on anything. They were pick-up lines, every one. I’d just been taught them. And I didn’t even want to pick you up. Actually, I live with my girlfriend. But it almost worked, didn’t it? “You will learn,” Neil Strauss told me, “to engineer every part of an interaction. You will open, you will demonstrate value. You will isolate your target from her group. You will make an emotional connection, you will make a physical connection. You will do this.”

Reader, I did not. Not quite. As both a responsible journalist and the faithful boyfriend of somebody already distinctly unamused, I was eager not to compromise myself in researching a story. Although I could have done. It was astonishing. I really could.

Although he would now describe himself as retired, Neil Strauss remains one of the greatest pick-up artists in the world. You know the Tom Cruise character in the movie Magnolia, who teaches hopeless men how to seduce women? Strauss was one of those. He has devised and taught techniques and routines that he believes will enable any guy to pick up women. He once sat and listened while one of his students used the exact words and phrases he had taught to make a date with Paris Hilton.

I meet Strauss in the Soho Hotel in London. He’s American and in his thirties and looks, as one rival pointed out, like the butt of Bugs Bunny’s japery, Elmer Fudd. “I am a small guy and funny-looking,” he admits. Although short, he wears chunky platform trainers that push him up to around 6ft. I’d imagine that women often assume he is gay. But not for very long.

There are four of us here – me and two eager seduction students. Both have heard of Strauss before. Or rather, they’ve heard of “Style”, the pseudonym that he uses online. Every pick-up artist in the world has heard of Style. Within their strange, slightly terrifying community, he is a superstar.

Two years ago, Strauss was living with a group of pick-up artists (or PUAs) in a luxury villa in Los Angeles, dubbed Planet Hollywood. The house was the physical hub of a vast PUA network that exists online, swapping tips and techniques for seducing women. PUAs call this “the community”. Within the community, Style and his housemates – Mystery, Tyler Durden, Papa and others – became something approaching legends. A steady stream of international visitors passed through, paying huge sums to learn their secrets. People would sleep on floors, and in cupboards, just to be able to stay, and learn. Then the housemates started to fall out. Eventually, Style left.

Now, a year on, he has written a stunningly explicit book, exposing everything he learnt, everybody he met while learning it, and everything he thought about them. That’s why he is here. Within the community, he concedes, lots of people are going to be very, very upset.

We will call my fellow students “Energy” and “Puma”, because, as you may have gathered, this is the kind of name that a pick-up artist has. I toy with being “Ace”, but it doesn’t catch on. Energy is 26 and from South Africa. He works in IT. A while ago, he says, he used to be fat. Puma is 35. He also works with computers. He’s tall, and a little bit gangly. He’s more comfortable in his skin than Energy, but no obvious Lothario. By the end of two nights, both will have flirted with scores of women, and extracted phone numbers from a handful. Puma will have kissed two. Without wishing to be too rude about either of them, these aren’t the kind of guys who would normally be in that situation.

We will be making the transition, says Strauss, to PUA from AFC (Average Frustrated Chump). Jargon, we quickly learn, is very important to PUAs. Picking up girls is known as “sarging”, for reasons far too insidery and odd to divulge. You start a conversation by “opening”, you finish it by “closing”. A group of people is a “set”, in that two girls will be a “two-set” and two girls and a guy a “mixed three-set”. We learn of Anti-Slut Defences (ASDs), Indicators of Interest (IOIs) and Cat/String Theory. This is seduction by equation, the point being that no situation is entirely unique, and any situation can be dealt with. It’s not exactly romance.

On night one, we concentrate on opening. Strauss teaches us two opening routines – the Jealous Girlfriend Routine and the Eighties Dogs Routine. It turns out that Energy, although he has never met Strauss before, already knows the JGR. He learnt it from the internet.

So. My first opening. Trembling like the AFC I am, I circle the Soho Hotel lounge, and approach a two-set, a pair of brunettes by the bar. I take one step past them, and turn, as though on a whim. I am supposed to say the following: “I have to get back to my friends in just a moment, but I need a female opinion on something. My friend just started going out with a new girl, but he’s still in touch with his ex. Do you guys think that’s ok?”

In fact, I say this: “Please excuse me. Very sorry to bother you, but do you have a moment? My friend has a girlfriend. And, um, she doesn’t like the last girl that he went out with. And what do you… I mean… is that…”

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