This wide-ranging popular study convincingly debunks some of the most enduring myths about the Hell-Fire clubs and other secret societies which flourished in the eighteenth century. Rather than being venues for the practice of devil worship, black magic and wild sex, Lord places the clubs more firmly within the English Enlightenment, and argues that they should be seen more in terms of the period's vogue for sociability and conviviality, or just the antics of wealthy young men with too much time on their hands and with a fondness for alcohol, than with the outlandish activities that have commonly been associated with them. Lord blames the hack press of the eighteenth century for inventing the sensational stories surrounding the clubs and instead maintains that they were far more ordinary than legend would have it. Ecclesiastical historians will be interested to find that some of the clubs may also have developed out of more theological worries, and in particular from fashionable doubts over the doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed in late eighteenth-century Scotland several members of the Kirk were members of the Beggar's Benison club. In fitting the clubs into more general eighteenth-century concerns, Lord has done historians of the period a service, although even she may be stretching it a little to argue that the interest in group masturbation of members of this last mentioned club should be seen as part of the Scottish Enlightenment's penchant for scientific and social exploration.