Opening her first collection of essays, Dubravka Ugresic noted that "every book has its own personal story of coming into being", one that "remains hidden from the reader and usually has meaning only for the author". Yet as she concedes, sometimes "it is hard to separate the story of its coming into being from the book itself, sometimes the story of its making is the book itself".¹ The book you have before you needs to be more than the story of its coming into being, not least because it is difficult for me to pinpoint exactly when and where work on it actually began. But in the belief that its beginnings might usefully illuminate several of its main lines — and also perhaps, one or two dead ends — I wish to begin by shining a retrospective light on several early encounters that significantly shaped its development.²