But there are many nasal complexities to negotiate – as [Cecilia] Bembibre points out: “It is really hard to get the information you need to bring back smells.” Her own chemical work has reproduced the scent of a 1750s potpourri at Knole – the ancestral home of the Sackville-West family in Kent – a description of which appears in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.

She has also reproduced the smell of the library at St Paul’s Cathedral in London by extracting detectable elements from the air in 2017, before it was refurbished. She then invited a specialist perfumer, Sarah McCartney, to attempt to create the same olfactory experience based only on her instincts about its components.

— Read more in A nose for history: academics recreate lost smells from the past at The Guardian.