It’s good to talk. Or so men are always being told, by everyone from mental health campaigners to the women they live with, bemused by the male tendency to spend all night in the pub with friends they have known for decades and yet come back utterly clueless about whatever is going on in each other’s lives. What can they be doing, all that time? Why haven’t they asked how X feels about splitting up with his girlfriend, or how Y is coping with his father dying?

To women whose own friendships revolve around an intimate and encyclopaedic knowledge of each other’s innermost feelings, intimacy based on never seemingly talking about anything that matters looks oddly empty and sad. No wonder, we think to ourselves, that more than a quarter of British men say they have no close friends at all; that male loneliness is endemic, that they won’t go to the doctor until they are practically dying, that male suicide rates are higher than female ones, that too many middle-aged men in particular seem to feel permanently angry for reasons they can’t articulate even to themselves. Bottling everything up does nobody any good.

Yet according to the anthropologist Thomas Yarrow, that may be doing the merits of the strong and silent friendship an injustice. Prof Yarrow, who teaches at the........

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