Search results for ""author giacomo casanova""

Born in 1725 to Italian and Spanish parentage, Giacomo Casanova lived a long and exciting life. A scholar and an adventurer Casanova travelled widely throughout Europe and Russia associating with rulers and Kings. For a time he was in the service of the army and he became a great political stirrer. But he vacillated between fortune and misfortune and often resorted to gaming and fiddling too. Of course Casanova is most well-known for his womanizing and he reveals time after time how he just couldn't help falling in love! His eloquence and charm will not be lost on the listener either: the writing is remarkably modern, accessible and funny too. It took Casanova eighteen years to write his memoirs and a further one hundred for them to be classified as genuine. Available now for the first time on audio and brilliantly brought to life by the effervescent Benedict Cumberbatch, in this first volume of his memoirs Casanova charts his childhood and life as a young man in Venice and Italy.Benedict Cumberbatch is one of Britain's brightest young actors. He starred as Stephen Hawking in the BBC's celebrated Hawking and plays the lead role in Michael Apted's 2006 film Amazing Grace. As well as his screen credits, Benedict has worked extensively in theatre and radio drama and recently as Sherlock Holmes in the popular TV series.

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Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbuckler, poet, self-made gentleman, bon vivant, Giacomo Casanova was not only the most notorious lover of the Western world, but a supreme story teller. He lived a life stranger than most fictions, and the tale of his own adventures is his most compelling story, and one that remained unfinished at the time of his death. This new selection contains all the highlights of Casanova's life: his youth in Venice as a precocious ecclesiastic; his dabbling in the occult; his imprisonment and thrilling escape; and his amorous conquests, ranging from noblewomen to nuns.

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The name of Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (1725-1798), in now synonymous with amorous exploits, and there are plenty of these, vividly narrated, in him memoirs. But Casanova was not just an energetic lover. In his time he was diplomat, business man, trainee priest, traveller, prisoner, magician, confidence trickster, gambler, professional entertainer and chalatan. He financed business projects, organised lotteries, wrote opera libretti and dabbled in high politics. Above all he was an autobiographer of enduring brilliance and subtlety who left behind him what is probably the most remarkable confession ever written. Casanova was a Venetian who explored to the full all the possibilities 18th century Venice offered by way of love and profit before being imprisoned, escaping from gaol, and fleeing from the city to begin travels which took him across Europe. In Moscow and London, Berlin and Constantinople, he met the famous men and women of the time - Catherine the Great, Voltaire, Louis XV, Rousseau - and recorded his encounters for the memoirs he wrote in retirement at the end of his life. These memoirs are by turns subtle, touching, thrilling, wonderfully comic and quite irresistible. Although the present edition includes one third of Casanova's enormous (though unfinished) book, it contains all his major adventures and all is greatest affairs of the heart. 'Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th century Europe. he ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace.' - V S PRITCHETT

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