Orwell is the most odoriferous English language writer I know. Norman Mailer would be second on the list, with passages such as this from An American Dream: “a deep smell came off Kelly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher’s block... With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch’s curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb.”
— John Sutherland, the author of Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, is anosmic. He writes about the "much-needed solace" of reading about smells in A nose-blind reader's guide to the world's most pungent prose at The Telegraph.
