'“The past is a foreign country,” as L. P. Hartley once famously wrote, and Gail Jones’s novel A Guide to Berlin suggests that Hartley’s famous dictum can also be inverted: that we see foreign countries mainly through the prism of the past and that to travel to another country is thus to immerse oneself in history. Certainly, the lonely expatriates who make up Jones’s cast seem more at home in the past than in the present.' (Introduction)