Into That Good Night

Peter Davidson has long displayed a kind of genius for writing about subjects that are both deeply fascinating and tantalisingly elusive, things that stick in your mind but that, in some ways, you feel to be hardly there at all. He wrote a wonderful book about the idea of things being thought of as northerly, for instance, and another about the ways in which painters and writers have been drawn to imagine the exemplarily indefinable moment of twilight. His new book, a very handsome and generously illustrated production, is about a topic which is, if anything, even harder to pin down: the night-time experience of gazing at an illuminated window. What he has produced is less a monograph than a study – an academic study to the extent that it is, like all of Davidson’s writings, full of strikingly diverse erudition, but also a study like something from a Constable sketchbook, all the more atmospheric for the sense it conveys of being improvisatory and unfinished.