PearlyBooks

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Here is a glorious assembly of infidelities, ranged under thematic headings that include Cravings, The Spouse's Shadow, Sex: Real and Imagined, Deception and After the Affair. It also offers a procession of historic affairs of the heart - an anatomy of the frailties and adulteries of the great and the good - from the battlements of Troy through the salons of Europe to today's corridors of power. Writers as diverse as Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Stendhal and Flaubert, along with John Updike, Martin Amis and Joseph Heller, are set alongside less familiar names writing about seduction, secrecy and broken promises. The reader will find scenes of tenderness and of sorrow, of bitterness and of rage, of ecstasy and of farce. The depravities of ancient Rome are compounded by the exuberant lust of the Earl of Rochester's poems. Edith Wharton asks advice of Henry James. Maria Callas falls for Onassis. Famous pairs represented range from Troilus and Cressida to Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. We learn of the exploits of such famous adulterers as James Boswell, Lord Byron and Cecil Parkinson.