In a time of fractious politics, being rude can feel wickedly gratifying, while being polite can feel simple-minded or willfully naïve. Do manners and civility

Keith Thomas's earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, w

A New Statesman Best Book of the Year A Church Times Book of the Year We are facing a crisis of civility, a war of words polluting our public sphere. In liberal

What counted as good and bad manners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Anna Bryson explores what is often entertaining evidence for Tudor and Stuart i

Here are hundreds of real people's most common complaints and the proper responses to them. Written by an eminent etiquette experts, this guide reveals how to b