Lessons in losing, from Cleopatra to Thatcher
15 mins | Nov 29, 2020
A short, but highly valuable history of defeat. Cleopatra made her loss richer than Octavius Caesar's victory, Napoleon's loss at Waterloo terminated his political career and sent him to die in exile, while John McEnroe's anger in losing "was parlayed into a kind of cultural super-strength." In the context of Donald Trump refusing to concede victory in the US elections, Matthew Sweet analyses in The Economist's 1843 magazine how the way we respond to defeat, reveals who we are.
From 1843