Author(s): Angus Trumble

Culture & Ideas

From the enlightened smile of the Holy Buddha to the lewd leer of the seventeenth century Dutch chicken groper, from the sociological to the scatological, Angus Trumble presents a uniquely readable and erudite insight into the cultural, physiological, artistic and literary history of that most universal of human expressions, the smile. Since the dawn of civilisation, the smile has carried a bewildering range of meanings, from the supreme enlightenment of the Holy Buddha to the chilly rictus of the television news reader. Yet every smile - whether deceitful or licentious, friendly or wicked, rude or polite, a leer or a snarl - results from a physiological process common to all humans. Here, Angus Trumble combines erudition, wit and charm in a distinctive and illuminating account of the art of smiling in its broadest sense. The smile intersects with countless fundamental aspects of human experience such as happiness, love, sex, piety and corruption - to say nothing of lipstick and cosmetic surgery. Questions abound. Why do we smile? How does smiling fall in and out of fashion? Who really invented the smiley face? (It wasn't Forrest Gump.) Why do the English say cheese, the Danes appelsin (orange), the Finns muikku (a kind of fish) and the Koreans kim chi (fermented cabbage)? And what is it about Mona Lisa's enigmatic smirk that continues to intrigue us? A Brief History of the Smile is a playful yet learned examination of not only 'the most immediate expressive contraction of which our bodies are capable', but of our very nature as social beasts.