In a recent piece for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw reviews Timothy Hampton’s Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full article. An excerpt appears below:

“Cheerfulness is a perennially uncool value, something to be satirised as a symptom of sinister unexpressed anger. And yet in the real world it is part of that unassuming habit of politeness without which social interaction is impossible. Cheerfulness is never saying die, a key component of Dickens and also, I would say, (though he isn’t mentioned here) John Updike. It may never be considered important, but reading about it here has a weirdly cheering effect.”