Freedom and solitude

YOU COULD HARDLY IMAGINE a more fortuitous moment to publish a book on the politics of loneliness. Although Noreena Hertz began work on The Lonely Century long before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the current crisis pulls together all the different strands of her argument and ties them together in a big, persuasive bow.

We were living through lonely times even before the advent of social distancing. In 2019, one in eight Britons reported that they did not have a single close friend they could rely on, up from one in ten five years earlier. Some 60 per cent of UK employees report feeling