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Giacomo Casanova was one of the most beguiling and controversial individuals of his or any age. Braggart or perfect lover? Conman or genius? He made and lost fortunes, founded state lotteries, wrote forty-two books and 3,600 pages of memoirs recording the tastes and smells of the years before the French Revolution – as well, of course, as his affairs and sexual encounters with dozens of women and a handful of men. His energy was dazzling.
Historian Ian Kelly draws on previously unpublished documents from the Venetian Inquisition, by Casanova, his friends and lovers, which give new insights into his life and world. His research spans eighteenth-century Europe.
This is the story if a man, but also of the book he wrote about himself. His own memoirs have brought him two centuries of notoriety. They have also changed forever the way we think and write about ourselves – and about sex. At the same time that revolutions – scientific, industrial, political and artistic – remade the world in the eighteenth century, Casanova created an intimate and exhaustive study of what he saw as the most revolutionary article of all – himself.
The world, and the way we look at ourselves in it, would never be the same again.
Historian Ian Kelly draws on previously unpublished documents from the Venetian Inquisition, by Casanova, his friends and lovers, which give new insights into his life and world. His research spans eighteenth-century Europe.
This is the story if a man, but also of the book he wrote about himself. His own memoirs have brought him two centuries of notoriety. They have also changed forever the way we think and write about ourselves – and about sex. At the same time that revolutions – scientific, industrial, political and artistic – remade the world in the eighteenth century, Casanova created an intimate and exhaustive study of what he saw as the most revolutionary article of all – himself.
The world, and the way we look at ourselves in it, would never be the same again.
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Reviews
A bedazzling jewel of sophisticated pleasures, the best book yet on the world's greatest lover.
enthralling . . . It is hard to conceive of a juicier, more informative account of social and sexual mores of 18th century Europe.
exhilarating . . . he has managed to make this story feel so fresh again.
'The thing is to dazzle,' wrote Casanova. In this enthralling book he dazzles once again, and so, too, does his biographer.
'Elegant and scrupulously researched, with an admirable feeling for the age'
sober, thoughtful and affectionate new biography
'Magisterial, utterly gripping . . . a vivid evocation of Georgian London.'
In Ian Kelly [Casanova] has at last found his Boswell . . . a great blast of a book, packed with energy and information, marinated in sympathy and understanding, and rippling with enthusiasm right down to the final footnote.
'Splendid . . . What makes this book much more than just a relaxed, racy biography is the way its author brings to life not just the man but also the time in which he lived.'
'Lush, funny, exhaustively researched and beautifully written'
'A wonderful melange of social history and biography. Vibrant, witty and fact-packed . . . something of a tour-de-force.'
'Beautifully formed and dressed, this is biography at its best.'
Superlative . . . a thoughtful, absorbing and hugely diverting book. Lushly illustrated, carefully researched and intelligently argued, this biography will entertain and enlighten.
In Kelly's hands, the story makes for a thrilling read
sparkling. . . . Kelly has a fine way with libertines and dandies.
Marvellous
delicious biography . . . He was probably, as he would be the first to admit, the most interesting man who ever lived, as this vivid and vibrant biography suggests