Title: Way too dumbed down, even for fun history reading.
Review: True, I did want a fun historical read, a sampling of royal and papal blackguards, but Farquhar's book is clogged up with cliched prose. It is just not skillfully written or edited. He takes the old historical chestnuts and does little with them but paraphrase such works as Suetonius, etc. I'm surprised at the Penguin imprint--I expected far better. This work is so light, it is often juvenile.
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