Soft

[An] erudite, immensely entertaining book...Mount makes for a delightful guide — Literary Review

From troubadours to Twitter: a thousand years of feelings, fads and furious sentiment, from renowned essayist Ferdinand Mount.

Whatever we think we feel, you can be sure that the past has had a part to play in it. In Soft, Ferdinand Mount tells the millennium-long history of emotion through delightful snapshots, often mischievous storytelling and a masterly command of history.

Mount explores the shifting importance societies have placed on empathy for the misfortunes of others. Each seismic moment, Mount argues, from the French Revolution to Civil Rights, has had a corresponding sentimental revolution that has fuelled great political turning points and come to define human civilization.

But no one wants to be accused of being sentimental; its detractors call it soppy, effeminate and populist — the stuff of soap operas and pop songs. The Reformation tried to stamp out excessive emotion, the Victorians resolutely maintained their stiff upper lips and no one loathed sentimentality more than the modernists — and yet, today, Mount argues it is not the stoics who are ruling the roost: we are living in an age of emotion.

From the Occitan poets of the 12th century to Paul McCartney’s songs, and modern debates around woke, this is a witty insight into the story of emotions and the way they have swayed human history.