“The free-wheeling and pioneering imagination of master historian Alain Corbin lends itself to conjuring the history of topics – smell, sound, sensibility, silence, anonymity – seemingly devoid of history. Written with distinctive clarity, insight and erudition, A History of the Wind is a captivating study that will open readers’ sense to the feeling of the past.”Colin Jones, Queen Mary University“Throughout his career, Alain Corbin’s gift has been to reveal the histories of things unseen. At once concise and panoramic, A History of the Wind ranges with Corbin’s characteristic imagination and verve across the arts and sciences as it seeks to understand humanity’s encounter with this ever-present yet elusive phenomenon. William A. Peniston’s translation allows an English-speaking audience to savour this late work from one of France’s greatest living historians.”Robert D. Priest, Royal Holloway, University of London“The wind has figured in many of Alain Corbin’s earlier histories: it carries the sound of bells and of silence, of odors foul and fragrant; it refreshes the air of the seaside. In his newest and most wide-ranging book – from antiquity to the last century – it is the main character: the subject of science, the instrument of God’s wrath, the motor of ships, a terror, a blessing, a wrecker. Less history than the biography of the great sea of air in which we dwell.”Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley