“My God, sir,” Lord Uxbridge is said to have observed to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, “I’ve lost my leg.” To which the Duke, of course, replied: “My God, sir. So you have.” This exchange has been much delighted in as evidence of British unflappability. But as Thomas Dixon shows, it is a lot less than half the story. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were renowned in Europe not for their emotional resilience but for “sweatiness, drunkenness, meat-eating, anger, violence, simplemindedness and melancholia”. Oliver Cromwell “burst into tears at the slightest opportunity”. In the eighteenth century, vast audiences wept at open-air sermons, while novel-readers blubbed self-consciously through Henry Mackenzie’s best-