In the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes a party conference in which the audience stands to applause their glorious leader, Stalin. The applause lasted for ten minutes, with no one prepared to be the first to stop clapping. “Palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching… however, who would dare be the first to stop?” Finally, the director of a paper factory sat down and others followed suit. Later, he was arrested. Stalin loved applause.

Recent reports that the University of Oxford has banned clapping have been over-written. The University Student’s Union has encouraged its members to default to “silent jazz hands” as opposed to clapping, thus to include those who are made anxious by excessive auditory stimulus. Queue much ire and hilarity from the usual suspects, Piers Morgan et al. “Snowflakes!” concluded The Sun. But strictly speaking, Oxford Student’s Union hasn’t banned it, just passed a motion to encourage its use.

And they are hardly the first. Applause is widely disapproved of in church – at least in the western tradition, though this hostility to applause in holy spaces was actually a nineteenth century innovation. And there is a long established convention that MPs do not clap each other in the House of Commons, though the unwritten rules on this are unevenly applied by the Speaker. As Erskine May has it: “Members must not disturb a Member who is speaking by hissing, chanting, clapping, booing, exclamations or other interruption.”