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“... to establish at the outset what Madame du Deffand was not. She was not, whatever the publisher of Benedetta Craveri’s book may claim, a woman who ‘approached love and sex with a frankness centuries ahead of her time’: her time was the 18th-century Regency, which took a casual view of fidelity, and the hedonistic age of Louis XV. She died in the ...”

“... in their social composition, in the role women played, and in their relationship to literary life. Benedetta Craveri’s book on the salons, The Age of Conversation, first published in Italy in 2001, often resembles the fable more than the reality. To be sure, it is grounded in serious research. Craveri has read through ...”

“... libertinage co-existed uneasily with revolutionary liberté. A similar tension runs through Benedetta Craveri’s The Last Libertines, a group portrait of seven French aristocrats, contemporaries of Laclos and Sade. Craveri notes in the preface that her title refers to ‘libertinism in its broadest sense’, by ...”