Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears

There is a persistent myth about the British: that they are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia—the first history of crying in Britain—comprehensively debunks this myth.

Far from being a persistent element in the "national character", the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of the nation's past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were ...