Cinema Sex Sirens: posters from the book – in pictures

Billed (by herself) as 'the only sex symbol Britain has produced since Lady Godiva', Diana Dors made a gaggle of libidinous B-movies throughout the 50s and 60s. Here she is, acting up a blue streak as a nightclub hostess in Tread Softly Stranger (AKA Nel Tuo Corpo L'Inferno), a steely north-country noir
Photograph: Omnibus Press

Russ Meyer was an American artist with an aesthetic sensibility as pure and distilled as a glass of holy water: 'If I can't have a woman with big tits, I'd rather play cards.' His passion found its most glorious expression on the poster for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – a tale of three buxom go-go dancers who go-go on a crime spree across the desert Photograph: Omnibus Press

Barbara Steele was a Merseyside-born actor who cut her teeth in twee British comedies before running to the bad (specifically to the wobbly sets of the Italian gothic horror). Check her out as a vengeful witch's daughter in La Sorciere Sanglante (English title: The Long Hair of Death), her modesty barely concealed by the licking flames of hell Photograph: Omnibus Press

Sashaying into the seedy hotel room comes Hussy. She's got a glass in her hand and a fag on the go. She's seen the drugs, she's seen it all. Michael Chapman's noirish tale of a London call girl starred an obscure young actor called Helen Mirren, making a brief bid for legitimacy before her career went south and she presumably wound up being spat out the bottom of the porn industry Photograph: Omnibus Press

Pam Grier tugs a revolver from the cleavage of her buttocks to play Foxy Brown, 'a whole lot of woman' with a penchant for castrating and cremating her adversaries. Where other sex sirens promised sweet, pliant pleasure, Foxy possessed drive, was somewhat lithe, charged a heavy tithe and had no time for jive Photograph: Omnibus Press

Before she went off saving seals and flirting with far-right politics, Brigitte Bardot was just another beaming French gamine, with her rump in the air and a phallic tower cupped lovingly in her palm. La Parisienne was her first big picture and, by way of celebration, she dispensed with her bra Photograph: Omnibus Press

Emmanuelle was the queen of the 70s soft-core genre. It made a star of Dutch model Sylvia Kristel, spawned a whole mess of sequels and was France's highest-grossing film in the year of Watergate and The Rumble in the Jungle. Lofty and imperious, Emmanuelle does not require cleavage or phallic towers to draw you in. She whispers her promise through parted lips Photograph: Omnibus Press

Social anthropologists of the 60s reputedly queued around the block, notebooks at the ready, to witness 'the world's greatest city laid bare'. Inside, in the dark, the nice and the naughty were arranged for their inspection. Viewers emerged from London in the Raw 'red-eyed and raw' and educated right up the kazoo Photograph: Omnibus Press

These days, Shirley Eaton is best known for her priceless turn as a dead naked gold girl in one of the early Bond films. Yet she also appeared in Date With Disaster, A Weekend With Lulu and The Girl Hunters, a torrid tale of men who hunt girls that may also be both tough and taut. There she is in the poster: free and happy, in the wild and nearly in the buff. But the smaller picture hints at a terrifying denouement, suggesting she may eventually be hunted – and caught – by a man
Photograph: Omnibus Press

The hunted turns huntress in Girl on a Motorcycle, a voguish late-60s road movie about a girl on a motorcycle. Jack Cardiff's picture comes loaded with psychedelics, sex and carnage. Marianne Faithfull plays the girl on a motorcycle Photograph: Omnibus Press