Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age and Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award and Pulitzer finalist for biography. He lives in Newton, MA.
“The great virtue of Mr. Damrosch’s biography is that, while never
losing critical distance, he fully succeeds in communicating that
‘vivid presentness,’ that ‘joyful eagerness’ for life, which is
what keeps us reading Casanova—and reading about him.”—Gregory
Dowling, Wall Street Journal
“Damrosch’s biography is undoubtedly a huge achievement, at once
erudite and vivid. By the end I was almost convinced that Casanova
was worthy of such prodigious scholarship.”—John Carey, Sunday
Times
“[A] stern but measured book. . . . In his stylish, insightful and,
yes, one must admit, sexy biography, Damrosch gives us the good,
the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.”—Laura Freeman, Times (UK)
“Colourful and entertaining. . . . The author is clear-eyed about
Casanova’s faults.”—The Economist
“There have been many biographies of Casanova before, some of them
very good, although they have tended to be thesis driven. . . .
[Damrosch] is in turn clear that he is writing a post MeToo
Casanova. At the same time, he is also keen that we should
understand just what a valuable document Histoire is for scholars
working on the 18th century.”—Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
“Damrosch’s biography condenses a vast trove of Casanoviana into a
well-researched, four-hundred-page narrative that is most engaging
on its subject’s catholic interests as an intellectual and on the
milieus he traversed as an itinerant charlatan.”—Judith Thurman,
New Yorker
“Leo Damrosch is a professor emeritus of literature with an
emphasis on the 18th century. And he reads Casanova post-Weinstein,
so to speak—but not sourly or dogmatically, instead confidently,
inspired, admiringly and at the same time critically, passionately.
And he can write brilliantly too.”—Jean-Martin Büttner, Basler
Zeitung (Basel, Switzerland)
“Damrosch’s adroit and balanced narration is never less than
enthralling.”—Michael Prodger, New Statesman
“Casanova rarely describes his surroundings and omits much on
contemporary Venice that he simply takes for granted. Damrosch
fills in the details, provides comment on Casanova from third
parties, identifies those lovers whose identities Casanova
attempted to obscure, adds previously unpublished material from
Casanova’s later years, and places the libertine’s transgressions
in the context of the mores of the time.”—Peter Neville-Hadley,
South China Morning Post
“Casanova’s life was in the best of hands with Leo Damrosch’s
erudition. He follows Casanova’s escapades and escapes as a
vertiginous heroic story. Out of Venice we are thrown into an
experiment with the eighteenth century, its tastes, and
transgressions, revealing a surprising ‘book of life.’”—Pierre
Saint-Amand, author of Suite libertine: Vies du XVIIIe siècle
“A pleasure to read, remarkably clear and readable, engaging,
vivid, informative—in short, an excellent biography that both
delights and instructs.”—April Alliston, Princeton University
“The name Casanova has become synonymous with serial
seduction—hardly a model in the age of #MeToo. The excellence of
Leo Damrosch’s energetic biography is that it reveals so many other
dimensions of this remarkable man: pioneering autobiographer,
questioner of received ideas, traveler through high culture and
low.”—Jonathan Bate, author of Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who
Changed the World
Praise for Leo Damrosch’s The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the
Friends Who Shaped an Age
“Damrosch brilliantly brings together the members’ voices. . . . As
this stellar book moves from one Club member to another, it comes
together as an ambitious venture homing in on the nature of
creative stimulus.”—Lyndall Gordon, New York Times Book Review
“Engaging and illuminating. . . . In The Club, as the actors appear
one by one, surrounding Johnson and Boswell on Damrosch’s stage, we
are transported back to a world of conversations, arguments, ideas,
and writings.”—Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
“Beginning in 1764, some of Britain’s future leading lights
(including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon) met
every Friday night to talk and drink. Damrosch’s magnificent
history revives the Club’s creative ferment.”—New York Times Book
Review, Editors’ Choice
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