Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World
Dan Hancox
Verso, £20

“WHY do we join crowds?,” asks Dan Hancox in his book examining the crowd in its physical, social and psychological forms. Mob, horde, rabble, mass, swarm — there is no shortage of denigratory terms to describe large gatherings of humanity, whether their communal purpose is to support their local football team or to celebrate in shared carnivalesque joy at the burgeoning music festivals but particularly to demonstrate for or against an infringement on their own or others’ freedoms.

Hancox claims that the crowd is “both the agent and the protagonist of history; the harbinger of change, the forcer of arguments.”