The Italian nobleman and polymath Giacomo Casanova (1725-98), famous in his lifetime for his brilliant intellect and his romantic exploits, is now recognized as one of the greatest chroniclers of eighteenth-century Europe.
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