Our interviews on sex and sexuality cover everything from sex education to sperm. Relationship coach and agony aunt Susan Quilliam chooses her best books on sex, including the 1972 The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort and Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski. The Joy of Sex, she argues, is a classic, but suffers from the limitations of its time, including “a lot on the man as the active person”.  Quilliam’s new edition of the book has changed all this and removed the regular references to group sex and the suggestion of having sex on a moving motorbike. Nagoski’s book, Quilliam argues, needs no editing, and is “one of the best books ever written . . . for guiding women in particular through the minefield of their sexuality in today’s world.”

Eric Berkowitz—journalist, author and lawyer and author of Sex and Punishment: 4,000 years of Judging Desire—talks about sex and society.  He chooses works of literature, including The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee as well as history (Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P Hallett and Marilyn B Skinner).  His own book ends at the end of the 19th century, because if he’d continued, he argued, the last chapter “would have been 450 pages long”.  Faramerz Dabhoiwala looks at the 18th century sexual revolution.  He chooses, amongst others, Clarissa by Samuel Richardson and Letters to the Women of England by Mary Robinson, arguing these books illustrate the nature of that revolution and the extent to which women were relatively disadvantaged by it.

Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History at New York University explores the minefield of sex education and argues that any attempt to find a value-free way of teaching the subject “is a fool’s errand”.  Kate Figes talks about sex and marriage; she also chooses Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. Her other choices include Married Love by Marie Stopes and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Evan Zimroth, the poet and novelist, chooses her best books on adultery. Fittingly, she breaks our rules and chooses six books.

Edmund White chooses his best works of gay fiction, including titles by Jean Genet, Christopher Isherwood, Alan Hollinghurst and E M Forster. Finally, to sex and sexuality in the animal kingdom as a whole: Tim Birkhead talks about sperm, how testes size among primates correlates very closely with promiscuity in a given species and how hens can reject the sperm of inferior cockerels, amongst other fascinating insights. Humans, he tells us, “are at the lower end of the [primate] scale, we’re not as exciting as chimpanzees [every male in the troupe copulates with every female every day], but not as dull as gorillas [silverbacks have no competition and so don’t need much sperm].”