Scotland, 1504. Lady Janet Fraser didn’t earn her reputation as Scotland’s most notorious sinner by following the rules. A former mistress of King James IV, she’s content to live her life from pleasure to pleasure. Even if those pleasures—and people—are forbidden. People like Sir Lachlan Ross, given the moniker The Highland Beast, a man as intimidating in battle as he is in size. A beast she discovers secretly wishes to be tamed and submit to her dominance. Or like her new ward, Lady Marjorie Hepburn, a convent-raised virgin with a desire to be taught all the sensual secrets of the marriage bed. Things that Janet is fully willing to teach her, again and again. There’s much for her to learn. And forbidden pleasures like the three of them together in one bed. But Lachlan and Marjorie both have ties to the king. As wicked lusts are indulged and affection unexpectedly grows into love, breaking the rules this time could mean all of their undoing...

Shocking revelations of a wife’s adultery explode in an incendiary nineteenth-century trial, exposing upper-crust New York society and its secrets. What could possibly go wrong in a wealthy matriarch’s country home when her dilettante son, his restless wife, and his widowed brother live there together? Strong Passions, rooted in the beguiling times of Edith Wharton’s “old New York,” recounts the true story of a tumultuous marriage. In 1862, Mary Strong stunned her husband, Peter, by confessing to a two-year affair with his brother. Peter sued Mary for divorce for adultery—the only grounds in New York—but not before she accused him of forcing her into an abortion and having his own affair with the abortionist. She then kidnapped their young daughter and disappeared. The divorce trial Strong v. Strong riveted the nation during the final throes and aftermath of the Civil War, offering a shocking glimpse into the private world of New York’s powerful and privileged elite. Barbara Weisberg presents the chaotic courtroom and panoply of witnesses—governess, housekeeper, private detective, sisters-in-law, and many others—who provided contradictory and often salacious testimony. She then asks us to be the jury, deciding each spouse’s guilt and the possibility of a just resolution. Social history at its most intimate, Strong Passions charts a trial’s twists and turns to portray a family and country in turmoil as they faced conflicts over women’s changing roles, male custody of children, and men’s power—financial and otherwise—over wives.

Everyone has at least one secret. And Phoebe Lancaster's could ruin her life. If the intimate photographs of her with her college lover, Carter Jones, ever came to light, it could end her grandfather's polical career. That's why she'll do anything to get them back, even if it means seeing Carter again.

"Stately Passions" provides a fascinating insight into the lives, loves - and morals, dubious though they may be - of some notorious denizens of the aristocratic world.

What if our strongest urges could be divested of their power to compel yet retain their power to fascinate us? What if our most basic appetites could be translated from the realm of bodily necessity to the sphere of artistic freedom? Jeff Nunokawa traces the variety of social pressures that inspired Oscar Wilde's lifelong effort to concoct forms of desire that thrill without menacing us, as well as the alchemies by which he sought to do so. Assigning Wilde a place of honor in a heady company of thinkers drawn from the ranks of philosophy, sociology, economics, psychoanalysis, and contemporary queer theory--Kant, Marx, Simmel, Weber, Freud, Hannah Arendt, Albert O. Hirschman, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and, of course, Michel Foucault--this is the first book to recognize Wilde not only as a blatant symptom of a familiar understanding of modern sexuality, but also as a grand theorist of the subject in his own right. The result is a wholly original portrait of the artist as a social critic who, in the midst of his humor, labored to illuminate and amend the book of love.

This historical explorationnbsp;details some of the most notorious scandals to have engulfed the British royal family and aristocracy, capturing not only the events and their era but also the essence of some of the world's greatest and most beautiful private dwellings. From the Hampton Court of Henry VIII to the modern scandals that saw the present Lord Brocket jailed, center stage is given to the British stately homes that have played witness to centuries of aristocratic indiscretion. Whether examining the "Profumo Affair," the call-girl scandal at Cliveden, the affairs of the lesbian Vita Sackville-West and her bisexual husband at Sissinghurst Castle, or the goings-on at Fort Belvedere, the Surreynbsp;hideaway where the Prince of Wales conducted his affair with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson,nbsp;this accountnbsp;provides a fascinating insight into the lives, loves—and morals, dubious though they may be—of some notorious denizens of the aristocratic world.