Nostalgia is today’s favoured mode of looking back. It saturates the press, serves as advertising bait, merits sociological study, expresses modern malaise. Obsolescence confers instant bygone status – no sooner is the fire engine retired than it becomes a precious relic. ‘Bring back proper kiosks’, yearned an English nostalgist. ‘Bring back trolley-buses … Bring back cars with starting handles.’ A Britain addicted to Victorian chivalry, neo-Gothic architecture, and the film Excalibur, surmised a 1981 critic, would ‘soon be appointing a Curator instead of a Prime Minister’. British curators are treasures in their own right, their heritage expertise exported worldwide, while at home Brideshead Revisited redux became Downton Abbey, today’s Edwardian triumph. Nostalgia ‘harks back to some rose-tinted past, of Marmite and The Magic Roundabout [1965–77], when kids played in the street, it was summer all year round, and Edrich was always 103 not out’. And before Britain’s imperial decline. ‘We’re going back to the past’, James Bond tells M in Skyfall, ‘where we have the advantage.