Thank you most of all to my wonderful editors Kirty Topiwala and Tracy Behar, and to Andrew Franklin, Cecily Gayford, Penny Daniel and everyone on the teams at Profile Books, Little, Brown and Wellcome Collection (especially Suzanne Connelly). Thank you to Jon Elek and Rosa Schierenberg at United Agents.
This book was written as part of my research fellowship with the “Living With Feeling” project at the Queen Mary University of London’s Centre for the History of the Emotions. Thank you to Wellcome, which funded this project, and to all involved with the Centre, most of all Thomas Dixon for his unfailing support and encouragement.
Special thanks go to all those who agreed to be interviewed for this book: Caspar Addyman, James Kimmel Jr., Lisa Feldman Barrett, John Portmann, Philippa Perry and Robert I. Sutton. Thank you for your time and humor.
I am especially grateful to the following people, who generously shared their thoughts and expertise: Richard H. Smith, Molly Crockett, Elsa Richardson, Richelle Whitehead, Kirsty Leanne Kynaston Gardiner, Jules Evans and Rob Briner. There are many others, too numerous to mention here, who offered suggestions and confessed their secret Schadenfreude along the way—thank you! I am, as always, indebted to my brilliant colleagues in the Queen Mary University of London School of English and Drama.
Thank you to David McFetridge, Catherine Nixey, Tom Whipple and Jo Fidgen for your pro tips.
And as always, thank you to my family—especially to Tom, Enda and Dermot for your Schadenfreude anecdotes, to Carmel for so much support of many kinds, and to my parents, Ian and Ursula, for their unfailing generosity and help. Thank you Alice and Edward for so much delight. And most of all, thank you to Michael Hughes, whose encouragement, example and love make this possible at all.