As subjects go, there are reasons to worry about “worry”. It hasn’t the exist­ential gravitas of “angst”, the Latinate respectability of “anxiety”, the quasi-scientific cachet of “neurosis”. It’s an unglamorous word, suggesting the trivial: fretting, fussing, fidgeting … and it has a thuggish side, too, deriving from a root meaning “to throttle” (think of a dog “worrying” a sheep). These are all, as it turns out, reasons to approve of it, as Francis O’Gorman’s intelligent and probing study makes clear. This isn’t an account of the profound forms of malaise we might like to imagine ourselves afflicted by, but the often banal obsessions that do in fact keep us awake at night. Did