The ancient Athenians were mad about it, but the Spartans thought it a waste of time. It flowered in the coffee houses and clubs of 18th-century London, but fell out of favour when the Romantics made it fashionable to prefer solitary communion with nature. Swift thought women improved it and Hume agreed: ‘Women are the Sovereigns of the Empire of Conversation,’ he wrote. Virginia Woolf considered that including talk about sex greatly enlivened the conversations at her Thursday soirées:
The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good … it was, I think, a great advance in civilisation.
Stephen Miller’s is a spirited account of the history of conversation, from the Book of Job and Plato to Starbucks and Oprah.
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