People Who Smell Like Goats

Derren Brown works through Marcus Aurelius's case for tolerating people who irritate you, starting with a stoic account of providence and ending on the strangest, funniest paragraph in book five: what to do about somebody's terrible breath. He tests the argument against his own life, where his partner's outrage during house renovations runs headlong into Brown's instinct to keep everyone happy. Neither position wins outright. Brown ends in book six, working out where patience has to stop and a boundary has to start.