Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire by Leslie Carroll Notorious Royal Marriages, as its mouthful of a subtitle articulates, offers a trip through almost a millennium’s worth of scandalous true stories populated by royal husbands and wives. And, boy, what an exciting trip it is. It is a book which owes its spine to the less than lovely love stories of thirty-two royal marriages told in chronological order by wedding date and marked by varying levels of spicy controversy, beginning with the ill-fated pairing of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1100s and concluding with the love triangle of Princess Diana, Prince Charles, and Camilla Parker Bowles, the subjects of many a paparazzi photo and much tabloid tittle tattle during the last couple of decades. History asserts that most marriages amongst European royalty and nobility were less concerned with love than with the prospects of expanding territories, which fueled the matrimony of the above-mentioned twelfth-century couple, and prolonging dynasties, which motivated Napoleon Bonaparte to divorce Josephine when she failed to bear him a male heir. Historical nonfiction author Leslie Carroll, armed with an assortment of well-researched facts and a knack for entertaining and not at all yawn-inducing storytelling, makes good cases of this in Notorious Royal Marriages, as she reveals that although the unions of most royal couples were celebrated with grand fairy tale wedding ceremonies, their perfunctory “I do’s” actually heralded a series of unfortunate marital and extramarital events. Quite delightfully, Notorious Royal Marriages lends weight to the lamentable and reductive age-old reflection that everyone loves a royal wedding… Everyone except for the royal couple, that is. — Notorious Royal Marriages is available at Fully Booked, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City.

Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire
by Leslie Carroll

Notorious Royal Marriages, as its mouthful of a subtitle articulates, offers a trip through almost a millennium’s worth of scandalous true stories populated by royal husbands and wives. And, boy, what an exciting trip it is. It is a book which owes its spine to the less than lovely love stories of thirty-two royal marriages told in chronological order by wedding date and marked by varying levels of spicy controversy, beginning with the ill-fated pairing of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1100s and concluding with the love triangle of Princess Diana, Prince Charles, and Camilla Parker Bowles, the subjects of many a paparazzi photo and much tabloid tittle tattle during the last couple of decades.

History asserts that most marriages amongst European royalty and nobility were less concerned with love than with the prospects of expanding territories, which fueled the matrimony of the above-mentioned twelfth-century couple, and prolonging dynasties, which motivated Napoleon Bonaparte to divorce Josephine when she failed to bear him a male heir. Historical nonfiction author Leslie Carroll, armed with an assortment of well-researched facts and a knack for entertaining and not at all yawn-inducing storytelling, makes good cases of this in Notorious Royal Marriages, as she reveals that although the unions of most royal couples were celebrated with grand fairy tale wedding ceremonies, their perfunctory “I do’s” actually heralded a series of unfortunate marital and extramarital events.

Quite delightfully, Notorious Royal Marriages lends weight to the lamentable and reductive age-old reflection that everyone loves a royal wedding… Everyone except for the royal couple, that is.

—
Notorious Royal Marriages is available at Fully Booked, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City.

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