Totally reprehensible.

Rats, rascals, and reprobates populate Mikey Robins’ scandalous and salacious new book, REPREHENSIBLE: POLITE HISTORIES OF BAD BEHAVIOUR.

A scavenger hunt of dirty rotten scoundrels through the ages, this compendium of cads, curs, creeps and Comstocks sheds light into the darkest corners of con artistry, where the cheats, frauds, and swindlers lurk.

A whole chapter, Misbehaving Royally, can hardly contain the antics of maniacal monarchs who battled, bribed, and beheaded, sovereign miscreants screwing subjects and peers with wanton abandon.

While Queen Victoria was seldom amused and purportedly covered table legs in case they should solicit impropriety, her Russian sorority, Catherine the Great, flaunted her furniture fetish with chairs featuring fellatio and tables relete with tumescent tossles.

The chapter Wayward Geniuses takes artistic temperament to task as well as scientific arseholery taking a William Tell aim at the apple crowning nob, Isaac Newton.

Titans of literature like H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre come under scrutiny for philandery, flatulence and phantom crustaceans, while Magellan cops a flagellan for being a one man Corona Virus of Christian evangelism.

Feuds, Fights & Insults is a fascinating chapter on put-downs and come-uppances par excellence, of deadly duels, rank rumours, and that old digger of two graves, revenge.

Popes and presidents, politicians and princes, Pharaohs and Pharisees, all come in for a proper pillocking, with a special place in hubris hell for the pious, prurient and Puritanical, aka hypocrites.

Quick with the quip and astride the aside with tongue in both cheeks, Mikey Robins’ REPREHENSIBLE not only succeeds in uncovering the scurrilous but being ever so entertainingly scholarly. I don’t remember Latin declensions being so much fun!

REPREHENSIBLE by Mikey Robbins is published by Simon & Schuster