Gathered together here -- in one volume -- is the best of bad behavior: more than 700 of the most irate, emphatic, amusing condemnations of impropriety, culled from nearly 200 etiquette books, ranging from the fourteenth century to the present. If you thought that books of decorum contained only dull, dry rules of good behavior, think again. The business of etiquette has as much to do with the wrong as with the right. Now a procession of characters -- from etiquette's grande dames to its flustered beginners teetering on the brink of misbehavior -- has been brought to rollicking life in thirty-five drawings by one of the great artistic wits of our century, Ronald Searle.
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