The scent of a place once visited. The taste of the foods of childhood. A song heard again after many years. A faded black-and-white photograph. These are all remnants of the past that do not feature much in history books, at least the traditional kind, yet they are crucial to how many of us relate to the past. What is in play here, of course, is nostalgia: the powerful sense of longing that befalls many of us when we think of times past.

Yet what is nostalgia? And are we living in particularly nostalgic times? The word itself may look (ancient) Greek to some, but it is not. It does, however, have its roots in the classical past. In ancient Greek nostos means ‘a return home’ and the verb algein denotes ‘to suffer’ or ‘to feel pain’. Nostalgia thus seems more apt to describe homesickness rather than a longing for the past—a spatial rather than a temporal dislocation.