Duel

The notorious adventurer and seducer Giacomo Casanova tells of his travels - on the run from the authorities of his native Venice - around northern Europe, poking fun at the ruling classes he encounters there, before focusing on a pivotal incident that occurs in Warsaw. Insulted by a Polish count over an Italian ballerina, Casanova finds himself forced to challenge his rival to a duel, and the sequence of events and their aftermath are described with gusto by the narrator. A rollicking autobiographical account by one of the most iconic figures of eighteenth-century Europe, The Duel is presented here with an extract about the same event from Casanova's memoirs, written fifteen years later.

Review: The remarkable thing about Giacomo Casanova is that not only did he have a bewilderingly eventful life, not only was he a thinker of wide reading and great shrewdness, but he also knew how to tell a tale as well as the cleverest of novelists. Tim Parks