ABSTRACT
One of the strangest attributes that retrospect confers upon the past is a set of characteristic qualities, an unmistakable feel that the past itself did not have when it was the present. A newsreel from the Second World War carries with it, as it were, the odour of the age – its anxieties, efforts and urgencies – no less palpable and rich to us than the smell of an attic in which we hid in childhood. A photograph of a flapper or a recording of a certain kind of jazz will bear with it a similar thickness of association.
