'W. G. Sebald was justly celebrated for the melancholy antiquarianism of his prose. The Anglo-German writer placed his narrators – solitary eccentrics or survivors of some traumatic past – amid historic spaces in England or Europe. There they moved through decayed mansions or unvisited museums, places emptied of life yet replete with stuff. Uncanny access to the past was granted by virtue of old postcards or Edwardian bric-a-brac.' (Introduction)