The Age of Scandal: An Excursion Through a Minor Period (The Folio Society)

240 pp. Introduction by Reay Tannahill. Illustrated with reproductions of contemporary portraits and drawings. This amusing foray into eighteenth century literature is an entertaining tabloid biography of an age not unlike our own; men and women of fashion led their lives under the avid scrutiny of a public with a sharp appetite for scandal and sensation. In the period between the so-called Age of Reason and the Romantic Revival - that which the author calls the Age of Scandal - aristocratic and privileged eccentrics flourished. Here we meet notorious persons such as the libertine Marquis de Sade, and the Countess of Kingston who journeyed to Rome in the hope of seducing the Pope.