Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did it Go? [Hardcover]

'I can confidently predict that Michael Bywater’s Lost Worlds is going to be an enormous popular success.'

‘Wonderfully original, entertaining and occasionally tear-jerking miscellany about life, loss and the human condition'

‘A magnificent companion...it’s where stand-up comedy meets sit-down thought...you’ll be hugely entertained'

‘Lost Worlds is a gorgeously written and barking-mad catalogue raisonne of, well, all kinds of stuff that we’ve lost'

‘What makes Bywater so good is the exactitude with which he remembers...It’s Bywater’s intellectual grief that gets me every time'

This is a catalogue made to preserve...Well above the ordinary --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Bywater brings a wit and irreverence to his musings which lifts the book way above standard nostalgia fare --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

While sometimes inducing a fond whiff of nostalgia, it can also leave a sense of regret --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

‘Few books have the capacity to enchant with both amusement and melancholy. This gem is one of them’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

They...go. They vanish. People. Civilizations. Languages. Philosophies. Works of art disappear, species are extinguished, books are lost, cities drown, things once thought immortal suddenly aren't there. Dunwich is drowned, Pompeii buried, Athena's statue gone from the Parthenon. Whole libraries of knowledge, galleries of secrets. Gone. Lost worlds. Little things, too. Five Boys chocolate. Train compartments. Snuff, galoshes, smog. Your mother's perfume. Your father's tobacco The way Paris used to smell. Our culture, our knowledge and all our lives are shadows cast by what went before. We are defined, not by what we have, but by what we have lost along the way. And so, Lost Worlds: a glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities. No mere miscellany, it weaves a web of everything we no longer have. Lost Worlds: the book that falls open at every page.

Michael Bywater is a writer and broadcaster, and writes the Lost World column for the Independent on Sunday. He has written two books, The Chronicles of Bargepole, and Godzone: Over the Outback and Into the Drink. He currently teaches at Cambridge.