Overview

Now available in paperback, The Last of the Light is a meditation on twilight in the Western arts and imagination, in thought, painting and literature. It takes us across the threshold of day into dusk, an uncertain world haunted by Romantic poets and painters, as well as exploring the twilight lives of minority and ‘overshadowed’ communities. The melancholy of smoky English autumn evenings is balanced by the midnight summer sun of northern latitudes, and the darkly oppressive heat of August in mid-twentieth-century Spain is ranged against the spectral grandeur of winter in London. This ambitious account of the arts of the evening deftly combines prose-poetry, memoir, philosophy and art history. Intertwining personal, cultural and artistic histories, it is a richly rewarding book written in a unique voice.

Full Product Details

9781780238272

Table of Contents

Reviews

"'The Last of the Light is both a celebration of and inquiry into the significance of temperature and skies ... Davidson takes us to places that are vast and lovely as well as somehow underlit and shadowy, where a kind of emptiness and uncertainty prevails.' - Kirsty Gunn, The Guardian; 'These days, you'd expect an author just to google ""twilight"" and pile up everything he finds. Not Davidson; this is a deep and personal meditation ... Davidson ranges right across the disciplines in his search for allusions, citing Ruskin, Rilke, Chopin, Kant and Vanbrugh along the way. The result is revealing, poetic and (unavoidably) illuminating. As a bonus, the book is beautifully and copiously illustrated.' - The Independent; 'What a treasure trove this book is ... Davidson's beautiful and scholarly chapters are an exploration of a passion for twilight ... beautiful and deeply nostalgic ... Davidson has given twilight the shrine it deserves.' - Adam Nicolson, Country Life; 'What an astonishing book this is: a cartography of dusk, an illumination of twilight as it has found its ways into the art, literature, dreams, moods and metaphors of Europe and beyond. Beautiful and subtle in its tracings, it combines memoir, memory, place-writing and cultural history by degrees so fine as to be imperceptible.' - Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks"

'The Last of the Light is both a celebration of and inquiry into the significance of temperature and skies ... Davidson takes us to places that are vast and lovely as well as somehow underlit and shadowy, where a kind of emptiness and uncertainty prevails.' - Kirsty Gunn, The Guardian; 'These days, you'd expect an author just to google twilight and pile up everything he finds. Not Davidson; this is a deep and personal meditation ... Davidson ranges right across the disciplines in his search for allusions, citing Ruskin, Rilke, Chopin, Kant and Vanbrugh along the way. The result is revealing, poetic and (unavoidably) illuminating. As a bonus, the book is beautifully and copiously illustrated.' - The Independent; 'What a treasure trove this book is ... Davidson's beautiful and scholarly chapters are an exploration of a passion for twilight ... beautiful and deeply nostalgic ... Davidson has given twilight the shrine it deserves.' - Adam Nicolson, Country Life; 'What an astonishing book this is: a cartography of dusk, an illumination of twilight as it has found its ways into the art, literature, dreams, moods and metaphors of Europe and beyond. Beautiful and subtle in its tracings, it combines memoir, memory, place-writing and cultural history by degrees so fine as to be imperceptible.' - Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks

Author Information

Peter Davidson is Fellow of Campion Hall, University of Oxford. He has taught at the universities of Aberdeen, Leiden and Warwick. He is the author of a book of essays about northern culture, The Idea of North (Reaktion, 2005), Distance and Memory (2013), a collection of verse, The Palace of Oblivion (2008) and The Last of the Light: About Twilight (Reaktion, 2015).

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