Soft - by Ferdinand Mount (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"[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.

Revealing all the ways people in the past expressed their grief and joy, 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 during this long history, powerful feelings have frequently come under attack. 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' songs, and modern debates around woke, this is a witty insight into the story of emotions and the way they have swayed human history.

Review Quotes

"Mount's canvas is far broader and more densely crowded than is indicated by this brief review. There is much to agree with in the book...Again and again he refutes the doomsters and the naysayers, and does so with good humour, warmth and wit." --John Banville, The Times

"Mount is absolutely gripping when he writes about the historical backlashes against sentimentalism." --Telegraph

"Soft is a compassionate, compelling and entertainingly eccentric survey of collective psychology and the madness of crowds." --Frances Wilson, TLS

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

"Highly readable... Splendidly readable...written with his characteristic verve and style, Mount's book...is timely." --Financial Times

"[An] erudite, immensely entertaining book... I have seldom read a work of cultural history that made me laugh out loud as frequently as this one did..." --News Beep

About the Author

Ferdinand Mount was Political Editor of The Spectator and Editor of The Times Literary Supplement. For two years he was head of Margaret Thatcher's think-tank - The Number 10 Policy Unit. He is an authority on politics today, and writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.

His most recent titles include Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall, from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson.