In Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt (1969), the elderly Aunt Augusta of the title advises her more conservative ex-banker nephew, the novel's narrator, who is later revealed as her son, on the profession of luggage loading. This novel is, in many ways, a nostalgic homage to an earlier epoch of travel, and both characters are, in their own ways, somewhat anachronistic. The septuagenarian Aunt Augusta, a woman who is pointedly shown to travel light and of an age to number among those first women who carried their own bags, is shown to cling onto a past full of adventurous escapades. Henry, on the other hand, attempts to recover a past life that never quite took off through embarking on a range of belated escapades in her company. I quote the above passage here because it reminds us that luggage and, correspondingly, a portable aesthetic, came to prominence in a literary age both of upheaval and of suspicion. However sour and destructive suspicion is shown to become, it was still the illicit allure of luggage – the cultivation of a collection of symptomatic keys and the bewilderment at the one case which yet resisted, the exhilaration at standing judgement over a locked case and the corresponding exhilaration at unlocked bluffing under scrutiny, the inscribed promise of transgressive discovery and of unsanctioned ‘adventure’ – that engaged creative attention.