Soft
A Brief History of Sentimentality
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Soft
Narrated by:
Paul Blezard
Buy Now for £15.22
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Narrated by:
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Paul Blezard
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By:
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Ferdinand Mount
A sweeping history of emotion that spans the decades, from renowned author Ferdinand Mount.
In this day and age, 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 vivid snapshots, masterly storytelling and bizarre historical anecdotes.
Revealing all the weird and wonderful 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 these great political turning points.
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, it is not the stoics who are ruling the roost: we are living in an age of emotion.
This is a witty, pacey story of the understanding of emotions and the way they have swayed civilisation.©2025 Ferdinand Mount (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Reads like an elegant love letter to the human heart itself.
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)
Mount is absolutely gripping when he writes about the historical backlashes against sentimentalism.
Soft is a compassionate, compelling and entertainingly eccentric survey of collective psychology and the madness of crowds. (Frances Wilson)
As cultural criticism, Soft is persuasively entertaining. (Hannah Rose Woods)
[An] erudite, immensely entertaining book...Mount makes for a delightful guide.
Highly readable... Splendidly readable...written with his characteristic verve and style, Mount’s book...is timely.
[A] superb study.
[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…
A magisterial, personal reflection on the freedom to express our feelings in all their gushy beauty.
This is both a thoughtful study and, as befits its subject, frequently moving. (Richard Sennett)
Witty, robust defence of the power of sentimentality to effect change.
I didn’t cry after reading this splendid book, but I was entertained and I did laugh quite a lot.
The narration
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