need ‘to make the familiar strange’. The same idea was developed further by the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), who spoke of the importance of what he termed ‘defamiliarization’. To appreciate something for what it really is, he argued, we need to be able to empty our minds and memories of all that we already know, and approach it as if it were something we had never encountered before. We should allow ourselves to be taken by surprise, to notice things that we had overlooked