This book is a timely addition to the sometimes bewilderingly broad field of scholarship on sentiment and sympathy. It is a lively and richly illustrated discussion of the ways in which humans feel, think, recall, and imagine others. It patiently guides the reader through the complex historical transformations and surprising conceptual continuities that characterize the ways in which these abilities – and their translation into ethical actions – have been theorized from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Carolyn Burdett, Senior Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Thrillingly expansive in its imaginative reach, this book takes the culture of sensibility and offers to read it, not in history, but as intellectual history. Tracing the tense co-existence of sensation and sympathy from pre-Enlightenment through to contemporary media spectacles, Jervis draws artists, novelists, philosophers and political theorists into a rich conversation about how emotion, affect and sentimentality shape our everyday relations to others.

Misha Kavka, Media, Film and Television, University of Auckland, New Zealand