Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster review – no place like home

This absorbing exploration of nostalgia raises questions about its slippery nature, and shows how it has been chillingly deployed in politics, from the cold war to Trumpism

In the 1970s there were American pressreports of an Iowa man who wastormented by his yearning forthe16-year stretch of time that ranfrom 1752 to 1768. His misery was theresult of not being able to find anyone who shared this deep nostalgia for aperiod when electricity was still arumour and America was proud to think of itself as British.

But does this really count as nostalgia? Is it not, actually, a bid for attention, a way for the man from Iowa to signal that, while his body might betethered to the cornfields, his mind isfree to roam in exquisite pastures where gentlemen routinely wear wigs and night-time travel is best reserved for a full moon? Agnes Arnold-Forster doesn't say, but deploying the anecdote allows her to draw attention to the slipperiness of the very concept ofnostalgia. Is it a legitimate and trans-historical emotion, like sadness or rage? Or could it be rather a cultural confection, a passing fancy expressive of a particular time and place (in thecase of the man from Iowa, this wouldbe Gerald Ford's post-Vietnam America)? Most fundamentally of all,can you feel nostalgic for a time oraplace that you never actually experienced yourself?