This is an auction for SCANDAL: A SCURRILOUS HISTORY OF GOSSIP by Roger Wilkes.

Amazon.com reviews:

"In SCANDAL Roger Wilkes examines three centuries of gossip, from Elizabethan pamphleteers to Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, although as one reviewer pointed out, a history of gossip is almost an oxymoron. Newspapers have always employed gossip columnists, from Hollywood's legendary Hedda Hopper, who played herself in Sunset Boulevard before her death in 1966 and who named her Beverly Hills home "The House That Fear Built", to the New York Post's infamous Page Six and the Mirror's 3am Girls. Gossip keeps people in the news, unless they are so powerful that they no longer need to be; but on the way up, gossip is essential to fame. Or as Errol Flynn said, 'It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper'."

"FIVE STARS!!! Newspaper and magazine gossip is a potent and sulphurous brew - much derided and much devoured - that long ago became part of the daily diet of millions. The raw ingredients are scandal, rumour, glamour and scurrility, and the best is shot through with (preferably illicit) sex, disclosure and danger. How and why has this happened, and where will this obsession lead us? "Scandal!" takes us from Regency London, where muck-raking scandal sheets were hawked in the streets, to the modern free-for-all where tabloid and internet gossip rule. From the madness of King George to the madness of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica, this book goes behind the scenes to look at the mechanisms that disseminate gossip and the power and influence that it continues to exert."

More very favourable reviews on Amazon.com.

Paperback 2003.

363 pages + 30 photographs.

Very good condition.

The cost of shipping is $6.95.

There is of course no charge for shipping if you collect this book from my shop in Palmerston North following the auction.

Payment within seven days, please.