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Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History. By Francis O'Gorman. Bloomsbury; 173 pages.

          When he is not teaching Victorian literature at the University of Leeds or writing books, Francis O'Gorman admits to doing a lot of unnecessary brooding. “Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History” is his affectionate tribute to lowlevel fretting – what the author calls “the hidden histories of ordinary pain” – in everyone's life.

          Humanity's sense of anxiety has deep roots. Contemporary angst is inextricably tied up with living in an advanced, hypermodern society, and yet, when worrying takes hold, it often does so in ways that appear altogether premodern, even pre-Enlightenment.

          If there is a message in the book, it addresses the everexpanding cottage industry around happiness and wellbeing. The latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association's “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, DSM5”, has broadened psychiatry's reach into everyday life, medicalising and stigmatising an ever greater number of quirks and foibles. Against this backdrop, Mr O'Gorman's celebration of the wonderful eccentricity of human nature is both refreshing and necessary.

          He believes that “being a modern worrier is just…the motheaten sign of being human” and playfully suggests that people should refine Descartes's famous dictum to: “I worry, therefore I am.”

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