One of the prime pleasures of Kate Lister’s lively A Curious History of Sex is 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. Who could fail to be filled with sympathy, for instance, by this bitter 1768 song about the legendary courtesan Lucy Cooper?
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