In late 2011 an intriguing work of non-fiction entitled The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began appeared in my local bookshop, although it was marketed to American readers under the even more grandiloquent subtitle, How the World Became Modern. Written by Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt, a doyen of New Historicism, or “cultural poetics” as it’s sometimes obscurely called, The Swerve swept all before it.
