Powercouples
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Winning combination of power and sex Spectacular cast list of historical favorites The power couples of history have determined our present: these are big players Full of surprising and salacious stories and anecdotes from private lives Takes us through how they met, who really wore the trousers and who the 3rd person was in the relationship Couple relationships always topical: from Adam and Eve to Bill and Hil. For history buffs, royal watchers, fans of biography and the hordes that buy Heat, Hello and OK Many great men (and a few women) have been sustained by the support of a low profile, self-effacing partner. Power Couples investigates the rare and intriguing cases where both partners hit the headlines. Our cast spans four continents and two millennia - though the power couple only really became a commoner phenomenon in the twentieth century. Couples examined include: Antony and Cleopatra, Justinian and Theodora, Macbeth and Gruoch, Ferdinand and Isabella, Elizabeth and Essex, John and Sarah Churchill, Catherine the Great and Grigory Potemkin, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Victoria and Albert, Pierre and Marie Curie, Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, Edward and Mrs Simpson, Mao Zedong and Jiang Quing, Juan and Eva Peron, John F. and Jackie Kennedy, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Charles and Diana, Tony Blair and Cherie Booth, and Victoria 'Posh Spice' and David Beckham. What would these men and women have achieved without their other halves? What powered the relationships that made them household names? Love? Sex? Obsessive passion? Shared ambition? A sense of duty? A hard-nosed calculation of the benefits of collaboration? You will find them all in Power Couples .
From the Back Cover
"The power couple is one big beast mated with another"
It used to be said that behind every great man there's a woman. But what happens when both partners are powerful in their own right? What draws two powerful people together into a relationship?
InPower Couples Mary Abbott sets out to explore these special and rather rare cases over two thousand years of history. She looks at noble, literary, political and celebrity pairings through the ages, and asks what made them tick.
Was it love, sex, shared ambition, a sense of duty, or the allure of power itself?
Entertainingly told with an eye for the unusual detail, this is the history of the world's most famous couples, from Antony and Cleopatra to Posh and Becks.
Mary Abbott teaches in the History Department at APU. Her published books include Family Ties: English Families 1504-1920 (1993), Yeomen of the Cotswolds (1993), Life Cycles in England: Cradle to grave (1996), History Skills (1996) and Family Affairs: A history of the family in 20th century England (2003).
Powercouples
Powercouples,Mary Abbott,Longman,0582771919,Biography,Biography / Autobiography,Celebrities,Couples,Historical - General,History,History: World,Marriages of celebrities,Social Control,Social History,Sociology - General,World - General,World History,History / General
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