'A brilliant work . . . Porter's picture of eighteenth-century England is boldly drawn . . . He ranges far and wide, from princes and paupers and from metropolis to the smallest hamlet. Stay-making and corsetry, prisons, rural festivals, diet and housing, bordellos and sex therapists . . . paintings and plays, work and wages, balloons and bastardly are only a fraction of the topics covered by this breathtaking narrative . . . No one will fail to learn much from Porter's bustling book' London Review of Books