Frances Wilson
Scents and Sensibility
Perfumes: The Guide
By Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
Profile 384pp £20
Perfume is an art and not a science, argue Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez in Perfumes: The Guide – but it is really a language. To be more precise, perfume is a text. One particular perfume described in these pages is the equivalent-for-some of Finnegan’s Wake: ‘needlessly complex and hard to read, like an experimental novel beloved of critics that you take on holiday resolving to finish at last but swap at the airport for a Robert Ludlum thing with a cracking yarn’.
In the extended introduction that precedes their 1,500 perfume reviews, Turin and Sanchez note that what little writing there is on perfume has fallen into two ‘unreadable’ genres, ‘breathless purple descriptions by ad writers’ or ‘poker-faced pseudoscience from aromatherapists’. The aim of Perfumes: The Guide is to make
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter. Sign up on our website so you never miss another dispatch.
Congratulations to @HanKangOfficial, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
We've lifted the paywall on Joanna Kavenna's review of The White Book from November 2017.
Joanna Kavenna - Carte Blanche
Joanna Kavenna: Carte Blanche - The White Book by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)
literaryreview.co.uk
Few surveys of British art exist. Those that do have given disproportionate space to recent trends and neglected the 150 years between Hogarth and Turner.
@robinsimonbaj examines what launched British artists of this era into the European stratosphere.
Robin Simon - The Wright Stuff
Robin Simon: The Wright Stuff - The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor
literaryreview.co.uk