A History of Delusions: the Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse
Victoria Shepherd
Oneworld, £16.99, 352 pages
Where do delusions come from? How is it that some people find themselves on the other side of the looking glass, believing themselves to be made of butter, or to be Napoleon, or dead? Victoria Shepherd’s book takes ten case studies of delusion – broadly understood as “a fixed, false idea, not shared by others, and unshakeable in the face of decisive evidence contradicting it” – and through them explores how psychiatric disorders have manifested themselves over 600 years in people’s beliefs about themselves and the world. Some of the subjects are more familiar – Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy and a lifelong melancholic himself, or Charles VI of France, who believed himself to be made of glass and swathed himself in soft furnishings for fear of shattering – and others are less well-known, but each case springs out of the book’s central question: can we understand?
