BOOKS

Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships 

Coming…

UK: Faber & Faber, 24th April 2025
US: Celadon (Macmillan), 6th May 2025

Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. The dangerously romantic school girls of the 1900s. The office gossips of the 1930s. The mum cliques of the 1950s. The angry activists of the 1970s. The coven – women who choose to live together in old age – of the present day. These ‘bad’ friends broke the rules about femininity they didn’t write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful.

This history of women’s friendships in the 20th century unpicks the stories we have learnt to tell about this vital bond, and gives what’s long overdue: a more expansive, rebellious vision of friendship fit for twenty-first century life.

Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune

UK: Profile Books/Wellcome Collection, 2018
US: Little, Brown Spark, 2018

Translations: Italy (UTET, 2019); Turkey (Kolektif, 2019); Finland (Atena, 2019); Korea (Dasan Books, 2019)

‘A delightful book, full of jokes and confessions’ Guardian, Book of the Day

Your boss calls himself ‘Head of Pubic Services’. A celebrity vegan is caught in the cheese aisle. Someone jumps the queue for the cash machine, and then their card is swallowed. And the faintest glimmer of a smile creeps across your lips…

Schadenfreude – enjoying the pain and failures of others – is an all-too-familiar feeling. It has perplexed philosophers and psychologists for centuries but, in a time of polarised politics, twitter trolls and ‘sidebars of shame’, has never been more relevant. Recent studies have shown that we smile more at a rival’s loss than at our own success. But why can it be so much fun to witness another’s distress? And what, if anything, should we do about it?

In Schadenfreude, historian of emotions Tiffany Watt Smith offers expert insight and advice. Ranging across thinkers from Nietzsche to Homer Simpson, investigating the latest scientific research, and collecting some outrageous confessions on the way – she reveals how everyone, babies, nuns, your most trusted friends, are enjoying your misfortunes. But rather than an emotional glitch, she argues, Schadenfreude can reveal profound truths about our relationships with others and our sense of who we are. 

Frank, warm and laugh-out-loud funny, Schadenfreude makes the case for thinking afresh about this much-maligned emotion – and perhaps, even, embracing it.

[This] treatise on one of the most shame-inducing but widespread of all emotions is funny and insightful ― Sunday Times

‘Educative, entertaining.’ ― Observer

The Book of Human Emotions

UK: Profile Books/Wellcome Collection, 2015
US: Little, Brown, 2016

Translations: China (Beijing MediaTime Books Co, 2016); Germany (Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 2017); Taiwan (Ecus, 2017); Turkey (Kolektif, 2018); Poland (Foksal, 2018); Italy (UTET 2017); France (Zulma, 2019); Korea, (Whalebook, 2019)

Other Format: ‘The Box of Emotions’ (Laurence King, 2020), contains book extracts

‘Eloquently interweaving scientific, philosophical and literary thought, from ancient to modern beliefs…educative, entertaining’ – Observer

‘Watt Smith treats each emotion with the expertise of a wine-taster’ – Mail on Sunday

‘A brilliant book’ – Irish Times

Is your heart fluttering in anticipation? Is your stomach tight with nerves? Are you falling inlove? Feeling a bit miffed? Are you curious (perhaps about this book)? Do you have the heebie-jeebies? Are you antsy with iktsuarpok? Or giddy with dépaysement? 

The Book of Human Emotions is a gleeful, thoughtful collection of 156 feelings, both rare and familiar. Each has its own story, and reveals the strange forces which shape our rich and varied internal worlds. In reading it, you’ll discover feelings you never knew you had (like basorexia, the sudden urge to kiss someone), uncover the secret histories of boredom and confidence, and gain unexpected insights into why we feel the way we do.

‘Witty, informative, undogmatic and thought-provoking, this wonderful book should convince us that emotions are never just neural events’ – Times Higher Education

On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock

UK: Oxford University Press, 2014 (available through academic libraries)

‘A major contribution to our understanding of the cultures of Victorian and Edwardian scientific practice’ (Michael Brown, Social History of Medicine, 2015)

This book explores the history of the flinch as a reflex response to danger and disgust, and as a distinctive part of the act of looking – and looking away. Focussing on the period from the 1860s to 1918, it explores how evolutionary theorists, experimental neurology and early psychology all drew on the idea of the flinch to illuminate their scientific thinking – and how these scientific observers often flinched themselves in their emotional encounters with their subjects, becoming more like actors and theatre audiences than the supposed paradigms of the objective gaze we remember them to be.

A ‘powerful contribution to our understanding of science and theatre during the age of Darwin and melodrama’ (Stanton B. Garner Jr., Theatre Journal, 2015).