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Lead book review

Where are the scents of yesterday? Entire countries have lost their distinctive smell

Michael Bywater wonders why the existence of smell still seems such a guilty secret

18 July 2020

9:00 AM

18 July 2020

9:00 AM

Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times Robert Muchembled, translated from the French by Susan Pickford

Polity, pp.260, 60

Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind A.S. Barwich

Harvard, pp.496, 28.95

Smell is the oldest sense. We owe our existence to it. The moment you start to talk about smell, things explode in a shimmering, chaotic starburst of epistemological and ontological complication. It is involuntary; we have no noselids. Smell stays switched on in our sleep: to inspire is to smell.

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