Knox takes us through the lives of memorable seducers and their critics, in sometimes academic and sometimes rococo prose dappled with doges, coups de foudre, rakes, bawds, coquettes, coxcombs and procuresses — with guest appearances by members of the Frankfurt School sunning themselves in La Jolla.

... an alluring and breathtaking history of enticement in the modern age.

Mr. Knox has written an ambitious book: part social commentary, part literary criticism, part legal history and populated with colorful (albeit shaggy) biographies of players big and small in the world of wooing over the past 300 years. Yet his fixation on the supposed binaries of seduction—the seducer as hero or villain, the conflict between passion and reason, women as agents or victims—is perplexing. Rather than reflecting any one template, his stories simply show how complicated courtship always was, in no small part because men and women bear the consequences of pleasure unequally.

Seduction, argues Clement Knox in this big and bold book, is a question of storytelling.

The book’s quasibiographical approach provides an unusual but engaging way of addressing its central topic, though readers wanting a more clear-cut exploration of the subject will almost certainly find it too tangential..