Emmeline Pankhurst, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela each brought about changes by beginning with a complaint that the status quo was wrong and needed to be changed. Complaint has driven society forward and has led to the abolition of injustice - but it is now associated primarily with inconsequential moans and frivolous litigation.

To reclaim complaint as a progressive, positive force, we need to know what we wrongly complain about, and why. This book - the first of its kind - explores every kind of complaint that people make, from the contradictory and the self-defeating to the paranoid and the Luddite. It also presents and analyses a new survey into whether Britons complain more than Americans, men more than women, and the old more than the young.