YOU'RE TOO KIND: A Brief History of Flattery.

• Author: Ignatius, David
• Position: Review

YOU'RE TOO KIND: A Brief History of Flattery By Richard Stengel Simon & Schuster, $25.00

MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, I SENT A LETTER to a college classmate and fellow journalist whom I'll call "K." I had not seen him in a while, and in the interim he had a powerful figure in the media, and it worried me slightly that we had never quite clicked as friends. I don't recall precisely what I wrote, except that it offered generous praise--fulsome praise, even--for one of his acerbic columns in The Washington Post.

Not long after that, "K" wrote a column about flattery. He noted the delicious pleasure he took in receiving insincere letters of praise from people who wanted to curry his favor. His theme was that insincere praise is really the best kind of all--because it shows how desperately someone wants to ingratiate himself. "After all," he wrote, "what do I care what this philistine oaf actually thinks about my article? On the other hand, there is a genuine if unintended compliment in the fact that he troubled to write--and the less he meant what he said, the greater the compliment." It was many years before I wrote another letter to "K."

But perhaps I flatter myself. Perhaps it was some other toadying letter that prompted "K's" acid response. Perhaps I have only imagined all these years that my insincerity rose to a level of obsequiousness that prompted his retort. Perhaps mine was only ordinary insincerity, and he had some entirely different fawning letter-writer in mind.

These are the sort of bilious thoughts that emerge from reading Richard Stengel's history of flattery. You're Too Kind is a learned and lucid examination of ass-kissing over the ages, and k will be a rare modern reader who does not at some point cringe with self-recognition. Even "K," I suspect, will see himself in this catalogue of courtiers and connivers. For as Stengel makes clear, flattery is the coin of our realm. And the most interesting form of ingratiation is one that will be familiar to Washington Monthly readers--who by definition are smart enough to see through the simpler forms of brown nosing and fawning praise--and must therefore play the Master Game, where flattery is coated in irony and cynicism. In the clever, meritocratic world we inhabit, as Stengel says, "You don't see ... fastball-over-the-center- of-the-plate flattery, but a slider that just nicks the corner." Do I flatter you, dear reader? I hope so.

What's eerie about this book is the universality of flattery. Stengel chronicles its persistence through all of recorded human history--from the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, from the courts of medieval Europe to the...