I was expecting a scientific survey of the emotions, but this is a literary and historical survey.The historical parts are very interesting but are, unfortunately, the smaller part of the book.The literary parts I had rather less patience with; they felt rather like amateur Freud, rambling on about (supposedly) univeral patterns of human behavior (where universal apparently means within the western literary tradition), and apparently quite ignorant of any post-WW2 brain science. (For example, how can one seriously discuss obsessive-compulsive disorder, as the book does, without even mentioning that drugs exist that quieten the malady?)