When is seduction about more than just sex? In this brilliantly original history, Clement Knox explores these questions as well as the philosophy, legality, politics, art and literature of a force that underwrites our world.

In the first history of its kind, Clement Knox reassesses our idea of seduction in a narrative that moves from Casanova’s pursuit of pleasure, to America’s racialised seduction laws, to the Nazi propaganda designed to stoke sexual panic, and up to #MeToo.

Modern, big-thinking and enormously entertaining, Knox offers an extraordinary range of stories to chart the many guises of seduction, showing that our ideas about desire, courtship, and power have always developed in step with a changing world.