What can be characterised loosely as a “return to the senses” has been taking place in recent years, within the social sciences, cultural history and philosophy. Likewise, we can follow Robert Jütte (2005) and David Howes (2005) in associating a similar shift in the public sphere in attitudes to the body and sensation with a historical period in late capitalism that validates experience and sensation in ever more novel and unusual ways. What Jütte himself terms “the new pleasure in the body” (2005:238) in a chapter of A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, from which the title for this essay is derived, he situates this rediscovery of the senses firmly within a landscape of consumer capitalism. However, the place of touch remains problematic. This essay explores this problematic and ambiguous status of touch, as a form of direct bodily experience which is always mediated, whether through skin or viscera, but also remediated; explored, presented and represented through other media and alternative sensations, in different ways, and through a variety of technologies as we shall see. As such, it is correspondingly grouped into three interweaving and roughly-divided sections. Firstly, ‘theories’, which situates touch and tactility conceptually and historically. The other two sections are dedicated to ‘experiences’ and to looking at some scholarship of the simple bodily pleasures of the body in the social sciences, around walking and swimming.