Shyness, basically, is an inconsiderate monster. Or, as the cultural historian Joe Moran argues in his wonderful new book, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness, it is an inconsiderate monster that has been a reliable, if largely invisible, companion to human history. Today, in the United States, shyness is often associated with a broad jumble of related and overlapping conditions, from occasional timidness to general awkwardness, from stage fright to the DSM-recognized social anxiety disorder. This imprecision is, it turns out, fitting: Shyness isn’t a single situation or character, Moran suggests, but, instead, a regular but also irregular interloper in human affairs, affecting people across ages and countries and cultures. Shyness can be, sometimes, a curse. It can be, as Dr. Heimlich acknowledged, occasionally a deadly one.

But shyness can also be, Moran argues, a great gift, its impulse toward introversion allowing for the inventive thinking and creative genius that might elude the more talkatively inclined. Shrinking Violets is a sweeping work of history and anthropology and sociology, summoning Simmel and Seneca and Sontag in its exploration of diffidence; it is also, more simply, a series of short biographies of shyness and those who have lived, to varying degrees, under its influence. Alan Turing, Moran notes, was bashful as often as he was brash. Agatha Christie, so bold on the page, was painfully shy in person. So was, when he was not performing leadership, Charles de Gaulle. And so was, when he was not performing music, Morrissey. Lucius Licinius Crassus, consul of Rome and mentor of Cicero, confessed to “fainting with fear” before delivering a speech. Primo Levi told Philip Roth about “this shyness of mine.” Oliver Sacks’s first book went unpublished because he lent its only manuscript to a colleague who committed suicide shortly thereafter—and Sacks was too shy to ask the man’s widow for the book’s return.

Shyness—at its core, perhaps, an uneasy acknowledgement of the vast distance that separates one human mind from another—has long been a companion to people and their endeavors. We might not all define ourselves to be among les grandes timides, as the French psychiatrist Ludovic Dugas preferred to call them; for some of us, timidity will be an only occasional visitor. But shyness, Moran suggests, however it chooses to manifest itself—and the thing about shyness is that the person who experiences it will have practically no say in the matter—can be a benefit as well as a curse. The shy are frequently thoughtful and occasionally brilliant. They are often sensitive to the needs, and the gaze, of others. The problem is that they live in a world that, despite the commonality of shyness, has extremely little patience for it.

Moran, who is British, counts himself among the timides; because of that he is aware of how difficult it is to be a shy in a swaggering world. He also knows what a quietly radical proposition it is to celebrate shyness. The far more fashionable thing—particularly in Britain, where Shrinking Violets was initially published, and even more so in the United States—has been to treat shyness as a problem to be treated and then, if at all possible, never mentioned again. Shyness, so emotionally adjacent to shame, is often also regarded as a cause for it. Within a culture that so deeply values self-confidence—and that takes for granted that social skills are external evidence of one’s internal self-regard—shyness is seen with suspicion. Quietness, in a world that is loud, can make for an easy enemy.