A historian's task is a voyage of discovery, and in these personal reminiscences Ivor Guest allows the reader to share the romance of recreating times past. Since his first published article appeared in the 1940s he has vastly expanded and enriched our knowledge of ballet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through more than a score of books, many of them definitive works, that are a rare blend of scrupulous scholarship and readability. The story of his involvement in the world of ballet is a romance in itself. When he was drawn to the study of ballet history, comparatively little...

Fanny Elssler was one of the most brilliant stars of the Romantic ballet. The accepted rival of Taglioni, she represented the passionate expression of the dance. Theophile Gautier distinguished the two ballerinas by describing Elssler as a pagan dancer and Taglioni as a Christian dancer. There was no doubt that it was Elssler he preferred. Her style found its true expression in her famous Spanish character dance: the Cachucha, but even more, it was her dramatic genius that conquered the audiences before whom she appeared. She approached, more closely than any other ballerina of her time, the...