Although modern life provides many examples of exorbitance – of wealth, growth, information, ambition, consumption, violence – preoccupation with what is 'over the top' is not new. What is it about the idea of going unreasonably beyond what is reasonable that exercises fascination? In this wide-ranging work, essayist and scholar Steven Connor reflects on the considerable and persistent force of culture's appetite for the exorbitant—a dynamic that not only survives despite the disapproval which accompanies it, but thrives on that disapproval.

Connor's discussion of the uses of hyperbole points to the essentially aggrandising function of all language, while chapters on the contemporary obsession with obsession and the unholy ecstasies of the ascetic fill out the orgiastic exorbitance of precaution. In the proliferations of modern bureaucracy, every attempt at reduction seems to stimulate further expansion. The long history of the ideas of usury and interest allows for new possibilities of exponential bubbles and crashes. The book reaches its climax with considerations of the libido of extremity in religious glory and apocalypse, along with the cultic rapture of the idea of extinction in Anthropocene thinking. Engaging thinkers from Erasmus to Freud and Agamben, Connor reflects on the Protean forms taken by the imagination of the exorbitant.