This is quite the well-versed book; seemingly vain and vapid, the subject of fame is handled with sophisticated care throughout this book. Defining and tracing fame throughout millenniae, this books is much other than what teflon and tabloids lend to the word nowadays. An interesting and engaging book.

A very clever and interesting book. Thought provoking, intricately done and wonderfully written.

This book covered way more than I thought it would. When you hear celebrity, you often think movie or music star. Since this book covers such a broad history, it includes the concept of celebrity as it once pertained to writers and philosophers and even criminals, among others. This book really does a good job of shedding light on the concept of "celebrity" and the role society plays in elevating individuals to such a high, sometime god-like, position.

The writing was sometimes very dense and hard to follow along with, which led to my putting it down for days at a time before coming back to it, It felt very much like an academic, social sciences book so if you're looking for a book on pop culture, you probably won't find what you are looking for here.

'I awoke one morning, and found myself famous', Byron (possibly apocryphal)

This academic monograph (not a popular history) takes a theoretically-informed look at the advent of 'celebrity' in the mid-C18th through to the mid-C19th. What it's not, and doesn't intend to be, is either a history of celebrity, or a book which looks at the lives of the famous in the Enlightenment/Romantic periods. Instead, it argues that phenomena that are frequently thought of as 'modern' e.g. internet fame, reality TV stars, take their lead from the technologies, debates and concepts of the C18th.

As with almost any monograph aimed at an academic readership (and we're not talking basic undergraduates here), this is dense and scholarly and assumes at least an acquaintance with people like Barthes and Habermas as Lilti carefully unpacks his terms of reference (e.g. celebrity, notoriety, glory and reputation). His material is pan-European, taking in Rousseau, Voltaire, Marie-Antoinette, George Washington, Napoleon and Byron, amongst others.

With its interests in the concepts of a public and the politics of fame, this is a subtle and detailed exploration of how mechanisms and debates about ideas of celebrity, privacy, subjectivity and publicity were developed in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways in the C18th-C19th centuries.