Let’s start with Cheri by Colette, which is about a young man who is sent off to an older courtesan to be trained before marriage, and ends up falling in love with her. Why did you choose that?

This is a book that gave me, as a young girl, an idea of an older woman’s sexuality. I read it when I was in my teens, it was one of the first erotic books I read and, although it has a very, very sad ending – I literally cried when I read it, interestingly the message that I took away from it was not that at 49 you are too old to have a lover, but that at 49 you are absolutely not too old to have a lover. So, even though he leaves her and goes back to his young and stupid wife, and she is desperate, the message I took away from it is that actually it doesn’t have to be like that. At 49 you can be extremely sexual and extremely desirous and you can be desired. And I think that’s one of the things that, obviously personally but also professionally, gave me quite early on the idea that sex is for life.

And that’s an important point.

I think it’s a really important point, and one we are becoming more and more aware of. There was some very nice research that came out in 2008 from Sweden suggesting that many couples in their 60s, 70s and 80s, are still having extremely active sex lives. And that it was really only the cultural taboos and the link of sexuality with fertility that had suggested we can’t do that. I’m nearly 60 and so my generation was the first Pill generation. The Pill really freed us from the link between fertility and sex and so also from the idea that once you’re past your menopause you’re no longer sexual, that only youth is sexual. And I think it’s a really important message and one that everyone – and especially sexual health professionals like me – is really taking on board right now.

Tell me about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and why that’s on your list.

I chose this for symbolic reasons, as well as the fact that it’s a very, very passionate book. Symbolically because this was the book that took 32 years [from 1928 to 1960] to be printed in the United Kingdom. And the trial, the Lady Chatterley trial, was a real turning point for freedom of expression around sexuality. There’s a quotation by the poet Philip Larkin: “Sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.” So it was a reflection of the sexual revolution in which I grew up: it was one of those things, like the Pill, a real turning point.

It was one of the first big books of literature to describe sexuality fully, very arousingly, and also to celebrate sexuality between the classes. Because there was a whole lot of other social change at that time, particularly in Europe. We were moving from a very structural, hierarchical society to a much more equal society, where having sex up and down the classes was very new and very revolutionary. So it’s a beautiful book to read, the love between them is brilliant, but it’s also legally and sociologically a very important book. Psychologically, I think the most important thing is that, for the first time perhaps, we’re seeing people being encouraged to be more whole and more sane and more healthy by acknowledging their sexual side, not just their mind. The whole theme of the book is you don’t just live through the mind, you live through the body, and the whole person. It’s a holistic sex book, if you like.

And there’s this lovely last paragraph where John Thomas says good night to Lady Jane, penis says goodbye to vagina, and a scene where he winds flowers around her pubic hair and around his penis and this was just seen as outrageously open. We would take it as quite quaint nowadays, but it really was a seismic shift in society, that we were describing body parts and we were describing physical acts. We were celebrating them and saying: “You’re not fully human unless you think this way, or feel this way!”