Michael Bywater

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

One used to be able to tell it was France by the aroma of garlic, black tobacco and the burnt rubber of the Paris Métro. But everything is sanitised now

[Alamy]
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  • 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

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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