Bracewell is perhaps Britain's most gifted, witty and learned cultural commentator; his first non-fiction book for Flamingo, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie, was brilliantly original, whipsmart and funny ('Surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written' - The Big Issue). It set out as stimulating and unprecedented a theory of the nature of Englishness as has been produced this decade; it has already begun to inch its way towards classic status, and to be the English counterpart to Greil Marcus' classic Lipstick Traces Bracewell now intends to turn his subtle and sensitive critical weaponry on that most evanescent and elusive of subjects, scent. It is something we (the Brits alone doling out #1billion a year) spend a lot of money and emotion on but not much thought. So, Bracewell will look at the nature of the perfume business, at the science and craft of manufacture, at the dizzying whirligig of scent marketing and advertising, at the identities people attach to perfumes, how they help define certain lives etc All of this without dipping into campery or losing sight of the essential difficulty of pinning down something made of vapour...Original, unorthodox, readable and fun