Oh yes! The best books about sex

From a guide to being an ethical slut' to Charlotte Roche's disturbing Wetlands, historian Kate Lister picks the best books about the beauty, ugliness and joy of sexuality

From sex history and modern erotica to self-help books and the art of penis origami, sex is a topic that spans every generation and culture in the world, so any best" list can only offer the books that have meant the most to me, personally and professionally, as a historian of sex.

Venus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France by Robin Mitchell is an impeccably researched history of how ideas of blackness and black women were appropriated by 19th-century white French culture as hypersexual, predatory and exotic". It opens with the story of Sarah Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus" who was paraded on tour before white paying tourists, and Mitchell's passionate rejection of the idea that historians should be objective and unemotional about their subject. The book is a triumph not only because it shows how narratives around black women's bodies have evolved, but because Mitchell unashamedly makes the personal political.