A Treasury of Royal Scandals

Author: Michael Farquhar
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140280241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
From Nero's nagging mother (whom he found especially annoying after taking her as his lover) to Catherine's stable of studs (not of the equine variety), here is a wickedly delightful look at the most scandalous royal doings you never learned about in history class. Gleeful, naughty, sometimes perverted-like so many of the crowned heads themselves-A Treasury of Royal Scandals presents the best (the worst?) of royal misbehavior through the ages. From ancient Rome to Edwardian England, from the lavish rooms of Versailles to the dankest corners of the Bastille, the great royals of Europe have excelled at savage parenting, deadly rivalry, pathological lust, and meeting death with the utmost indignity-or just very bad luck.

A Treasury of Great American Scandals

Author: Michael Farquhar
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0142001929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Following on the heels of his national bestseller A Treasury of Royal Scandals, Michael Farquhar turns his attention to matters a little closer to home with A Treasury of Great American Scandals. From the unhappy family relationships of prominent Americans to the feuds, smear campaigns, duels, and infamous sex scandals that have punctuated our history, we see our founding fathers and other American heroes in the course of their all-too-human events. Ineffectual presidents, lazy generals, traitors; treacherous fathers, nagging mothers, ungrateful children, embarrassing siblings; and stories about insanity, death, and disturbing postmortems are all here, as are disagreeable marriages, vile habits, and, of course, sex: good sex, bad sex, and good-bad sex too. We can take comfort in the fact that we are no worse and no better than our forebears. But we do have better media coverage. Bonus educational material: A brief history of the United States, including scandals! The American Hall of Shame! A complete listing of presidential administrations!

A Treasury of Deception

Author: Michael Farquhar
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143035442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
We may say that honesty is the best policy, but history—to say nothing of business, politics, and the media—suggests otherwise. In this infinitely citable book, the author of two bestselling treasuries of scandal recounts some of the greatest deceptions of all time. With what forged document did the Vatican lay claim to much of Europe? Who wrote Hitler’s diaries? Why do millions still believe the vague doggerel that Nostradamus passed off as prophecy? Organizing his material by theme (con artists, the press, military trickery, scientific fraud, imposters, great escapes, and more), Michael Farquhar takes in everything from the hoodwinking of Hitler to Vincent “the Chin” Gigante’s thirty-year crazy act. A Treasury of Deception is a zestful, gossipy exposé—and celebration—of mendacity. A Treasury of Deception also includes: Ten tricksters from scripture Ten great liars in literature Ten egregious examples of modern American doublespeak Ten classic deceptions from Greek mythology

Royal Affairs

Author: Leslie Carroll
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440634777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
A funny, raucous, and delightfully dirty history of 1,000 years of bedroom-hopping secrets and scandals of Britain's royals. Insatiable kings, lecherous queens, kissing cousins, and wanton consorts-history has never been so much fun. Royal unions have always been the stuff of scintillating gossip, from the passionate Plantagenets to Henry VIII's alarming head count of wives and mistresses, to the Sapphic crushes of Mary and Anne Stuart right on up through the scandal-blighted coupling of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Thrown into loveless, arranged marriages for political and economic gain, many royals were driven to indulge their pleasures outside the marital bed, engaging in delicious flirtations, lurid love letters, and rampant sex with voluptuous and willing partners. This nearly pathological lust made for some of the most titillating scandals in Great Britain's history. Hardly harmless, these affairs have disrupted dynastic alliances, endangered lives, and most of all, fed the salacious curiosity of the public for centuries. Royal Affairs will satiate that curiosity by bringing this arousing history alive.

Princesses Behaving Badly

Author: Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594746656
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
These 30 true stories of take-charge princesses from around the world and throughout history offer a different kind of bedtime story . . . Pop history meets a funny, feminist point-of-view in these illustrated tales of “royal terrors who make modern gossip queens seem as demure as Snow White” (New York Post). You think you know her story. You’ve read the Brothers Grimm, you’ve watched the Disney cartoons, and you cheered as these virtuous women lived happily ever after. But real princesses didn’t always get happy endings—and had very little in common with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, or Ariel. Featuring illustrations by Wicked cover artist, Douglas Smith, Princesses Behaving Badly tells the true stories of famous (Marie Antoinette; Lucrezia Borgia)—and some not-so-famous—princesses throughout history and around the world, including: • Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a Nazi spy. • Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who slept wearing a mask of raw veal. • Princess Olga of Kiev, who slaughtered her way to sainthood. • Princess Lakshmibai, who waged war on the battlefield with her toddler strapped to her back. Some were villains, some were heroes, some were just plain crazy. But none of these princesses felt constrained to our notions of “lady-like” behavior.

Scandalous Women

Author: Elizabeth Kerri Mahon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101478810
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Throughout history women have caused wars, defied the rules, and brought men to their knees. The famous and the infamous, queens, divorcées, actresses, and outlaws have created a ruckus during their lifetimes-turning heads while making waves. Scandalous Women tells the stories of the risk takers who have flouted convention, beaten the odds, and determined the course of world events. *When Cleopatra (69 BC-30 BC) wasn't bathing in asses' milk, the last pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt and forged an important political alliance with Rome against her enemies-until her dalliance with Marc Antony turned the empire against her. *Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1748), a mathematician, physicist, author, and paramour of one of the greatest minds in France, Voltaire, shocked society with her unorthodox lifestyle and intellectual prowess-and became a leader in the study of theoretical physics in France at a time when the sciences were ruled by men. *Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1928) fought to end discrimination and the terrible crime of lynching and helped found the NAACP, but became known as a difficult woman for her refusal to compromise and was largely lost in the annals of history. *Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) had a passion for archaeology and languages, and left her privileged world behind to become one of the foremost chroniclers of British imperialism in the Middle East, and one of the architects of the modern nation of Iraq.

Royal Babylon

Author: Karl Shaw
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767909399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
An uproarious, eye-opening history of Europe's notorious royal houses that leaves no throne unturned and will make you glad you live in a democracy. Do you want to know which queen has the unique distinction of being the only known royal kleptomaniac? Or which empress kept her dirty underwear under lock and key? Or which czar, upon discovering his wife's infidelity, had her lover decapitated and the head, pickled in a jar, placed at her bedside? Royally dishing on hundreds of years of dubious behavior, Royal Babylon chronicles the manifold appalling antics of Europe's famous families, behavior that rivals the characters in an Aaron Spelling television series. Here, then, are the insane kings of Spain, one of whom liked to wear sixteen pairs of gloves at one time; the psychopathic Prussian soverigns who included Frederick William and his 102-inch waist; sex-fixated French rulers such as Philip Duke D'Oreleans cavorting with more than a hundred mistresses; and, of course, the delightfully drunken and debauched Russian czars - Czar Paul, for example, who to make his soldiers goose-step without bending their legs had steel plates strapped to their knees. But whether Romanov or Windsor, Habsburg or Hanover, these extravagant lifestyles, financed as they were by the royals' badgered subjects, bred the most wonderfully offbeat and disturbingly unbelievable tales - and Karl Shaw has collected them all in this hysterically funny and compulsively readable book. Royal Babylon is history, but not as they teach it in school, and it underlines in side-splitting fashion Queen Victoria's famous warning that it is unwise to look too deeply into the royal houses of Europe.

Bad Days in History

Author: Michael Farquhar
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426212682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Book Description
"Farquhar's ... entries draw from the full sweep of history to take readers through a complete year of misery, including tales of lost fortunes (like the would-be Apple investor who pulled out in 1977 and missed out on a $30 billion-dollar windfall), romance gone wrong (like the 16th-century Shah who experimented with an early form of Viagra with empire-changing results), and truly bizarre moments (like the Great Molasses Flood of 1919)"--

Shredded

Author: Ian Fraser
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857906232
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
This is the definitive account of the Royal Bank of Scotland scandal. For a few brief months in 2007 and 2009, the Royal Bank of Scotland was the largest bank in the world. Then the Edinburgh-based giant - having rapidly grown its footprint to 55 countries and stretched its assets to £2.4 trillion under its hubristic and delinquent former boss Fred Goodwin - crashed to earth. In Shredded, Ian Fraser explores the series of cataclysmic misjudgments, the toxic internal culture and the 'light touch' regulatory regime that gave rise to RBS/NatWest's near-collapse. He also considers why it became the most expensive bank in the world to bail out and why a culture of impunity was allowed to develop in the banking sector. This new edition brings the story up to date, chronicling the string of scandals that have come to light since taxpayers rescued RBS and concluding with an evaluation of the attempts of the bank's post-crisis chief executives, Stephen Hester and Ross McEwan, to dismantle Goodwin's disastrous legacy and restore the damaged institutions to health. 'A gripping account - RBS was a rogue business, operating in what had become a rogue industry, with the connivance of government. Read it and weep' – Martin Woolf, Financial Times

Royal Pains

Author: Leslie Carroll
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0451232216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
The author of Notorious Royal Marriages presents some of history's boldest, baddest, and bawdiest royals. The bad seeds on the family trees of the most powerful royal houses of Europe often became the most rotten of apples: über-violent autocrats Vlad the Impaler and Ivan the Terrible literally reigned in blood. Lettice Knollys strove to mimic the appearance of her cousin Elizabeth I and even stole her man. And Pauline Bonaparte scandalized her brother Napoleon by having a golden goblet fashioned in the shape of her breast. Chock-full of shocking scenes, titillating tales, and wildly wicked nobles, Royal Pains is a rollicking compendium of the most infamous, capricious, and insatiable bluebloods of Europe.