Most scandals become as dusty and faded as your grandmother's shawl, and as irrelevant. "Scandal" appears to mean mainly English scandals, though there are accounts of the famous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, the Dreyfus Affair, the Teapot Dome scandal in America in the 1920s, some old Hollywood affaires. We are given a re run of the rather sad Profumo Case, a potted biography of the Hon. Tony Moynihan (who once threatened to settle in Ireland), various recent sex scandals involving English politicians, etc. The concluding chapter, describing, the torrid affair between Sir Peter Harding, chief of Britain's armed forces, and the much younger Lady Bienvenida Buck (!), reads rather like the plot for a Waugh novel.
Much more chilling is the behaviour of Baroness de Stempel, who in 1990 was sentenced to seven years for forging the will of her aunt, Lady Illingworth, and for stealing more than £500,000. Her second husband was also sentenced to four years, and her two children got lesser sentences.