{"title":"Books by Leo Damrosch","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780300205411","title":"Jonathan Swift – His Life and His World","description":"Winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography:  The life of satirist Jonathan Swift, written by a master biographer and leading scholar of eighteenth-century literature  Selected by New York Times Book Review as a Best Book Since 2000   “Superb. . . . Damrosch’s outstanding book has raised Swift’s provocative genius to life.”—Jeffrey Collins, Wall Street Journal   Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?   In this deeply researched biography, Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift’s life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swift’s parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift’s public version of his life—the one accepted until recently—was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets.      Assembling suggestive clues, Damrosch re-narrates the events of Swift’s life while making vivid the sights, sounds, and smells of his English and Irish surroundings.Through his own words and those of a wide circle of friends, a complex Swift emerges: a restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56232141390197,"sku":"9780300205411","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300205411_30f0a786-23c6-461c-abf9-323250b0b13f.jpg?v=1786012764"},{"product_id":"9780300248289","title":"Adventurer – The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova","description":"A fast-paced narrative about the world-famous libertine Giacomo Casanova, from celebrated biographer Leo Damrosch  “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  “A nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites. . . . Another top-notch work from Damrosch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)   The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring priest, an army officer, a fortune teller, a con man, a magus, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, a spy—and the first to tell his own story. In his vivid autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty love affairs, as well as dramatic sagas of duels, swindles, arrests, and escapes. He knew kings and an empress, Catherine the Great, and most of the famous writers of the time, including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin.      Drawing on seldom used materials, including the original French and Italian primary sources, and probing deeply into the psychology, self-conceptions, and self-deceptions of one of the world’s most famous con men and seducers, Leo Damrosch offers a gripping, mature, and devastating account of an Enlightenment man, freed from the bounds of moral convictions.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57685758312821,"sku":"9780300271027","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56232248770933,"sku":"9780300248289","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300271027_2a2f0a58-c764-4dd5-86af-e111bf1c527d.jpg?v=1792598934"},{"product_id":"9780300251784","title":"The Club – Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe story of the group of extraordinary eighteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern  Selected by New York Times Book Review as a Best Book Since 2000   A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA Kirkus Best Book of 2019  “Magnificently entertaining.”—Washington Post   In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.”   In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56233213657461,"sku":"9780300251784","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300251784_bd6fa2c9-e768-4661-82b7-d90b2c3ac729.jpg?v=1786012397"},{"product_id":"9780300268621","title":"Storyteller – The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fictionBest of 2025 Lists: Wall Street Journal, Top 10\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEconomist\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAir Mail, Top 10\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChristian Science Monitor, Top 25\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWashington Post, Notable Works of Nonfiction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLiterary Hub, “Ultimate Best Books”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWorld Today Journal, Top 25“Damrosch brings to Stevenson’s life the calm, humane interpretive powers that he deployed with such success in . . . The Club. . . . [An] excellent book.”—Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street JournalRobert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific.   Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist.   In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56419554066805,"sku":"9780300268621","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300268621.jpg?v=1792423135"},{"product_id":"storyteller","title":"Storyteller","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fictionBest of 2025 Lists: Wall Street Journal, Top 10\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEconomist\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAir Mail, Top 10\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChristian Science Monitor, Top 25\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWashington Post, Notable Works of Nonfiction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLiterary Hub, “Ultimate Best Books”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWorld Today Journal, Top 25“Damrosch brings to Stevenson’s life the calm, humane interpretive powers that he deployed with such success in . . . The Club. . . . [An] excellent book.”—Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street JournalRobert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific.   Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist.   In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57499381006709,"sku":"9780300303735","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300303735.jpg?v=1791213004"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-leo-damrosch.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}