giving lessons', 'as sparkling as champagne'; and who appreciated the sleeping souls: ‘People are too tired to be happy’. ‘Here is our new Pico de la Mirandola’, wrote one (exhuming the 15th century philosopher whose Oration on the Dignity of Man has been called ‘the Manifesto of the Renaissance’); this was ‘culture personified’, others liked ‘the charm of erudition combined with an overflowing imagination’, or the union of ‘knowledge and humour’. Zeldin explained his ‘free history’ as a rebellion against scholarship being condemned to use only classical forms of presentation, he was attempting to give history the freedom to do what abstract art had done to traditional representational art, to enlarge the range of discoveries it could make. He wanted to reveal more of ‘the human factor which, despite all efforts to regiment it, is an unfailing source of surprises’, and to change the way people looked at the past, by making them more aware of how much what they saw differed from what others saw. Happiness marks the expansion of Zeldin's interest into philosophical history, not philosophy in the academic sense, but the extraction of wisdom out of reflection on the disappointments and achievements of the past. By surveying the whole course of humanity's wanderings across the centuries, people could now view the possibilities of life differently, in the same way that artists painting landscapes differently transformed ideas of natural beauty. An Intimate History of Humanity Next, Zeldin turned to the seemingly insuperable obstacle in the way of human fulfilment, the obstinate survival of fear, hatred and greed, and to the turmoil produced by conflicting emotions. The Intimate History is the book that has won him his widest audience, all over the world, and it continues to be reprinted and discovered afresh by succeeding generations. It is history made directly relevant to contemporary concerns, and at the same time it enriches the meaning of contemporary concerns. By analysing how the expression of emotions changed in different civilisations and centuries, it shows the limits of the idea of an immutable ‘human nature’. Though it points to escape routes out of present-day discontents, it also reminds that escape often leads to unpleasant surprises. Zeldin replaces stability with unpredictability. Each of the twenty-five chapters shows how a ‘fact of life’ which seems impossible to change becomes far less inflexible when its variations through the centuries are understood. The chapter ‘Why there has