Lessons in losing, from Cleopatra to Thatcher

By Matthew Sweet

Victory is a great leveller. In triumph, most of us stick to the script as we enjoy the sweet sugar rush of success. We smile. We reach, giddily, for people to thank. We may weep. Exceptions to this rule are transgressive – which is why so many people have shared the clip of the novelist Doris Lessing clambering out of a taxi to be informed by a kerbside journalist that she has just been awarded the Nobel prize in literature. “Oh Christ,” she said, as if she’d been told that she’d left the bath running.

Defeat comes with a greater repertoire of responses. Do we spit and stamp like Rumpelstiltskin? Do we embrace it, like the comedian Bob Newhart, passed over seven times for an Emmy, who nevertheless agreed to spend the 2006 ceremony on display in a glass box. (The audience was told that if acceptance speeches were not kept to time, he would asphyxiate.) Do we protest about the unfairness of the universe, like the water-soluble Wicked Witch of the West? “Oh what a world, what a world,” she wails, on discovering that she occupies a reality in which little girls can liquidate regimes that run on black magic and flying monkeys.