A rake’s progress

This monumental unabridged audio production of Casanova’s memoir The Story of My Life in three volumes covers his first 49 years. He was born in 1725 into a struggling theatre family in Venice, the carnival centre of Europe, and masks, masquerades and music were so much in Casanova’s blood that a glorious, effervescent theatricality lights up these 125 hours. The narrator, Peter Wickham, is so convincing that he must surely have had difficulty re-assuming his own identity after the final recording session.

Constantly seeking pastures new, Casanova travelled through France, Russia, Spain, Constantinople, Poland and England, transported by sedan chair, sleigh and felucca, but mainly by hideously uncomfortable carriage (74 changes of horses between Moscow and St Petersburg). A charmed life provided him with patrons in each country, enabling him to live extravagantly in aristocratic circles, dining and gambling, frequently on the edge of legality. He narrowly avoided the gallows when he presented false bills of exchange in Holland, and he escaped from Poland after seriously wounding a duke in a duel, in which an injury to his own hand nearly cost him his arm.