Roger Wilkes" Scandal: a Scurrilous History of Gossip is a light amble through three centuries" worth of gossip columns. Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher"s formidable press secretary, once likened gossip columns to a polite form of blood sport, and there can be no doubt of the role of the scandal sheet in the hunting out and shooting down of many a public figure. Wilkes, who writes for the Daily Telegraph and has written books about infamous crimes such as Blood Relations on the Bamber murders, has assembled a collection of some two dozen episodes of gossip in history, stretching from the days of Daniel Defoe through the early years of Vanity Fair and down to the modern-day era of Private Eye and cyber-gossip. Examples are thrown in from the United States (inevitably Monica-gate among others) but not from France, where gossip has long been a subversive and not simply scurrilous weapon from the days of Voltaire onwards. Not surprisingly Wilkes has an elevated opinion of the role of the gossip columnist, assuming that only newspapers can muck-rake. He thus misses out on what has become a respectable topic amongst social historians in recent years--verbal gossip, insult, profanity and blackmail. And despite his title, he misses out on some of the great scandals of the modern era. I looked in vain for Dilke, Parnell and Gladstone in the late 19th century and Aitken, Hamilton and Mellor in the late 20th century. Tittle-tattle is one thing, scandal quite another. In this book we get a lot of the hunt, but too little of the kill. --Miles Taylor