The Verneys.(Brief article)(Book review)

The letters of the Verney family survive as the largest and most continuous collection of personal correspondence from seventeenth-century Britain, and Tinniswood draws on them to produce a lively, almost novelistic account of an aristocratic family "with a long lineage and a habit of backing the wrong side." Their stories range from the outrageous--Sir Francis Verney, who "turned Turk" and became a pirate along the Barbary Coast; "Mad" Mary ...