Cheeky history lesson: It's not always good to be king

0 Comments | USA TODAY, June, 2007 | by Maria Puente

On Royalty: A Very Polite Inquiry Into Some Strangely Related Families

By Jeremy Paxman

Public Affairs, 288 pp., $26.95

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One of the many peculiarities of British law is that it is still a crime punishable by transportation (to Australia, one wonders?) to call for the overthrow of the Crown.

No one has been prosecuted under this 159-year-old anachronism in at least a century. As British TV journalist Jeremy Paxman so entertainingly explains in his new book, this is a law as unnecessary as it is laughable in today's U.K.

Nearly 1,000 years and 40 monarchs since the Norman conquest -- 10 centuries of fools, thugs, freaks and lunatics, fratricidal wars and regicidal revolutions, marriages and divorces, babies and...