The bedside book of bastards

This entertaining and informative book is a collection of amusing tales and anecdotes about villains, murderers, cannibals, plotters, and knaves--among them, Nero, Attila the Hun, the Borgias, Blackbeard, the Marquis de Sade, a curiously ravenous fellow named Liver-Eating Johnson, among others. As the authors say in their preface: "History records the names and misdeeds of some perfectly awful people. The list, alas, is all too long. We present some of the worst of them, some famous and some obscure."