Ask most women to point out the clitoris on a diagram and the finger lands in the right place immediately. Ask what shape the rest of it takes, and the answers thin out fast. That gap is not a lapse of attention. It is a lapse in the material: for most of the twentieth century, the diagrams handed…

The human body runs two separate sweat systems, and only one of them was built for cooling. The other — the apocrine system — sits in a narrow set of places: the underarms, the areolae, and the sub-pelvic and perineal region. It stays dormant through childhood, switches on at puberty, and produces…

Somewhere in the first year or two of living together, most couples quietly invent a language. Nobody sits down and drafts it. It assembles itself out of habit and repetition until a lamp left on at a certain angle, or the sound of a particular drawer opening, carries more meaning than a sentence…

There is a particular moment, usually somewhere around 7:40 on a weekday morning, that needs almost no description. The drawer is open. The drawer is empty. And somewhere in the back of the closet, zipped inside a beach bag from a trip two summers ago, there is a bikini bottom that is technically…

A change of address does not reliably produce desire. The research on holidays finds small average gains in wellbeing that fade soon after ordinary life resumes. The research on women's desire keeps returning to conditions — sleep, quiet, the absence of low-grade vigilance — rather than to scenery.

The three things working against comfort on a long-haul flight are dry air, reduced cabin pressure, and hours of stillness in one position. Two of them are decided before you leave the house — by what you wear and what sits in the seat pocket rather than in the overhead bin. The third is decided by…

For most of the twentieth century, the largest structure in the human body devoted entirely to sensation went unmapped, unlabelled, and in several editions of the standard anatomy text, unmentioned altogether.

Ask an older woman in your family how she kept her figure through decades of raising children, and she will rarely mention a number. She will talk about supper at a set hour, about bread that took time to rise, about not leaving the table hungry and not returning to it out of boredom.

Somewhere around 1:40 in the morning, in a bedroom that looks entirely unremarkable from the street, a woman is performing a manoeuvre she has never once described out loud. Slowly, in increments, using the weight of one shin as an anchor, she is reclaiming eleven inches of duvet. Her husband is…