Some of the most melancholy chapters chart the mess made of education and the decision – an altogether outlandish one to be taken by a Labour government bent on social mobility - to cancel the Direct Grant, by which certain private-sector schools offered a proportion of their places to bright children from poor homes.
The original edition of Unreasonable Behaviour offered a rather melancholy final chapter.
Chapter 1, "Melancholy Magic: Robert Louis Stevenson's Evangelical Anti-Imperialism" is an impressive, thorough piece of criticism, and the highlight of the book.
There's a melancholy tone to the chapters that return to Macleod's lonely boyhood: the death of his parents that left him an orphan at a young age; the girl he loved from his first day at school and lost to his best friend; the schoolyard tormentors who made his life a misery; the dark yet joyful enchantment of the island and the sea.
Other chapters are more elliptical, melancholy accounts of Ms. Cunningham's attempts to grapple with health concerns and a failing marriage.
In a chapter called "How To Cure Melancholy in Fourteen Days," Mr. C. recommends that we think of others.
Some of these side-trips feel vestigial, but Sinclair's visit to Athens – told in the penultimate chapter of the book – is superb: melancholy and acerbic.
It largely accounts for the difference in tone between the melancholy but high-hearted world of the early chapters in Proust's series, where Swann is free to roam between the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the demimonde while still being a trusted Jew among the Boulevard Jews like Proust's family, and the straitened and suspicious social circumstances in the last books.
There is an awkwardness to the early prose and the opening chapters - with their rent boys and melancholy - feel more Pet Shop Boys than glam rock.
Shostakovich's 15th and last string quartet is a melancholy chronicle of one man's life, at least its final chapter.
Yet, while these chapters are carried off with aplomb, it is the melancholy at the heart of The Inheritance of Loss that fuels the narrative.
