Love and sex

Written in northern India in the third century, when erotic culture was at the heart of a refined civilization, the Kamasutra is the world's most famous sex manual. LOVE AND SEX tells the story of this Hindu treatise, from its origins in ancient India to its resurgence in the modern West. In meticulously detailed form, James McConnachie paints a unique portrait of the sensual era in which the Kamasutra was written, evoking the world of pleasure-hungry men—and women—for whom it was intended. He also presents how the last surviving manuscripts were tracked down in India by visionary Victorian scholars, brought to the West, and painstakingly translated. He also reveals how, aided by a clandestine and select group of sexual experimenters and iconoclasts, the eccentric explorer Richard Burton unveiled the book to English society in an attempt to spark a revolution. And how the work then ended up in the hands of pirated pornographers, before being discovered again with great excitement in the 1960s. With an engaging narrative, LOVE AND SEX invites the reader to follow the paths of the Kamasutra in order to understand the greatness of its content and the aspects of history that made it capable of crossing so many centuries and cultural and geographical borders.