I think it implies that people feel there’s a danger in humourlessness, which shows just how much savagery there can be in humour.

Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality.We were so interested in the idea that this book, Feeling Jewish, at least for me, seems to say a lot of things about a kind of structure of feeling that might be British-Jewish. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. AH: Also, making fun of yourself… At the conference “Contemporary British-Jewish Cultures” at Bangor University this month (March 2018) many speakers described this idea as something inherently Jewish, too.

Some of our correspondents have described this as ‘feeling European’ – because the dominant backgrounds are Ashkenazi. And both my books regard that situation as becoming increasingly common to all people who feel themselves the subjects of a globalised world. I had approached the book with a measure of doubt, wondering whether – being of an age with the author but never married – I would find myself excluded from its thesis. So as they saw it, their choice was between condemning him for being bad, or showing a liberal understanding of why he turned out so bad.Particularly when it becomes tyrannical, when you really can’t afford not to be witty – then we know something must be up, right?

From Freud to Ferrante, and One Thousand and One Nights to Fleabag , she looks at marriage in all of its forms – from act of love to leap of faith, and asks: what are we really doing when we say ‘I do’? But it’s telling that an early chapter centres on the concept of veils; in a nod to the story of Salome, she presents seven types of “veil” that serve to occlude or reveal meaning in marriage, and the reader is conscious throughout that she has chosen to draw a veil over the most intimate elements of her own relationship, or at least to offer only selective glimpses in the service of broader arguments. I read Tribes (2010) by Nina Raine, and I thought that’s exactly the kind of thing you describe – the Jewish family as an iconic description that you also have in your book. That, at least, is her stated intention, though by the time she reaches her epilogue, she finds herself questioning her own motives: “I’m married to someone I feel I can’t live without. DB: That’s very interesting… The notion that satire has somehow become the only plausible way of getting your news.Baum herself has tackled the subject before, in a different medium; together with her husband, Josh Appignanesi, she is the co-creator of two films, The New Man and Husband, documentary (mockumentary? They feel nobody sees the brilliance that goes into creating comedy, and how deep and wise what they’re saying is in comic form.