The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra - Softcover

A beautifully written exploration of the Kamasutra's third-century Indian world and how profoundly its nineteenth-century 'discovery' and dissemination has affected our own. -- Lucy Moore As James McConnachie's scholarly, stylish and entertaining study shows, over the course of its 1,700-year history the Kamasutra has been all things to all men, from grubby under-the-counter sex manual to fount of the highest sensual-spiritual wisdom. -- Christopher Hart * Sunday Times * A fascinating cultural history which puts the Kamasutra back in its rightful position. -- Frances Wilson * Daily Telegraph *

Shortlisted for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2008 The Kamasutra was written in northern India in the third century AD, when erotic culture lay at the heart of an exquisite civilization. The Book of Love is a unique portrait of this sensuous era, evoking the world of the pleasure-seeking men - and women - for whom the book was written. It is also the story of the West's discovery of the Kamasutra: how the last surviving manuscripts were tracked down in India by visionary Victorian scholars, and painstakingly translated. It exposes how, with the help of a clandestine coterie of sexual experimenters and iconoclasts, the outrageous explorer Richard Burton unleashed this shocking volume on English society in an attempt to start a revolution. The Book of Love then follows the Kamasutra underground, where it was forced into the hands of pirate pornographers before being thrust once more into the daylight in the wake of the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover.