In Humanity: An Emotional History, Walton examines the history of each of our core emotions - fear, anger, disgust, sadness, jealousy, contempt, shame, embarrassment, surprise and happiness - in turn. For Walton, love and hate (between which there is famously only a thin line), are fundamental feelings that inveigle their way into all the other emotions. And he demonstrates that without the emotions, there would be no human history.

This highly original and necessarily idiosyncratic work mixes history, philosophical insight and the latest science to produce a vivid and exuberant account of how emotions have shaped our past.