The devil in nineteen guises: bargaining, bored, litigious, in love, outwitted by a peasant, defeated by a woman's tongue. The anthology runs from Luther's day to Kipling and gathers Balzac, Gogol, Hawthorne and Marlowe's Faustus alongside forgotten Sunday-magazine fiends. It is a survey of what each century thought evil looked like when it sat down to talk.