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by Clement Knox

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What makes a bad choice irresistible? In brilliantly original history, Clement Knox offers new insight into the art – and history, legality, politics and literature – of seduction. If sex has generally been agreed a private matter, seduction has always been of intense public interest. Whether the stuff of front-page tabloid news, the scandal of nineteenth-century American courts, or the heart and soul of the literature across the eras, we are fascinated by stories of temptation and resistance, seduction and sex. In the first history of its kind, Clement Knox explores seduction in all its romantic traditions. But he also resets our view of seduction as a political, cultural force: a hatemonger seduces the vulnerable, and a politician courts the voter. Knox's history moves from the Odyssey to the medieval damsel to 1720s Venice, when the world's most famous womaniser – Casanova – was born. He writes of Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter Mary Shelley and her friend Caroline Norton...