History’s Worst Decisions (Stephen Weir, 2005), History’s Greatest
Scandals (Ed Wright et. al, 2006), (Murdoch Books/Pier 9).

If you want to occupy part of your holidays – as I have just done –
reading about history’s idiots/ idiotics, you can’t go past these two
250-page volumes.

But first, a quiz to test your knowledge of some Very Important Trivia:

(Greatest Scandals): 1. America’s ‘worst president’, who according to e
e cummings was ‘the only man, woman or child who could write a simple
declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors’.

2. Another US president who was ‘an introvert in an extrovert’s job’ who
spent his last night in office drinking, sobbing and praying.

3. He said ‘power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’.

4. Among her lingerie she had a bullet-proof bra.

5. This statement got into Bartlett’s ‘Familiar Quotations’: ‘If “is”
means is and never has been, that is one thing. If it means there is
none, that was a completely true statement.’

6. When she died at 67 tales persisted that she’d been crushed by a
horse while attempting to have sex.

7. ‘Demons made me do it but Oral Roberts cast them out over the phone’.