Buckle your trousers, fasten your seatbelts, here comes Kate Lister. Her curious history of sex is a wild ride, made all the more enjoyable by a wonderfully irreverent approach. If she ever tires of being an academic historian she might try stand-up comedy. I’ve never had so much fun learning stuff.

This book contains, as the title promises, many delightful curiosities.

...Kate Lister’s first book...is not about libido in times of plague and anxiety. But it’s impossible not to read it now through that lens.

One of the prime pleasures of Kate Lister’s lively A Curious History of Sexis getting a sense of the continuum between ourselves and our ancestors. It can be difficult to conceptualise people who lived centuries ago as vivid, funny individuals, but being horny, it turns out, is a great leveller of time. The major accomplishment of this history is to share enough arcane, surprising information about sex and sexual mores to make it a riot to read, while humanising the participants by way of their own silliness, abjectness and randiness.

... Understanding our sexual history, Lister contends, will blow open the taboos of our sexual present. She sets about the task with gusto.