England, France, Spain—over the last 700 years, these countries, to put it mildly, have largely determined the fate of the world. But what was happening there—behind the facade of wealthy palaces? This is what Maria Garantsina will tell us. She is the author of a popular blog on LiveJournal and Yandex Zen, and she unpacks court intrigue as if she herself, in a past life, had lived at the courts of the Tudors and Lancasters, Valois and Bourbons: it seems that otherwise you can’t know history in such details. She faces contradictory versions of the same events, shows what tricks the key figures used to achieve their goals, and offers her own versions of what happened. Most of all, though, the main thing is that Maria is a wonderful storyteller. Readers of this book definitely won’t be bored.