Description: Neither day nor night, twilight has long exerted a fascination for Western artists, thinkers, and writers, while haunting the Romantics and intriguing philosophers and scientists. In The Last of the Light, Peter Davidson takes readers through our culture's long engagement with the concept of twilight--from the melancholy of smoky English autumn evenings to the midnight sun of northern European summers and beyond. Taking in poets and painters, Victorians and Romans, city and countryside, and deftly combining memoir, literature, philosophy, and art history, Davidson shows how the atmospheric shadows and the in-between nature of twilight has fired the imagination and generated works of incredible beauty, mystery, and romance. Ambitious and brilliantly executed, this is the perfect book for the bedside table, richly rewarding and endlessly thought-provoking.
Brief description: Peter Davidson is fellow of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a book of essays about northern culture, Distance and Memory, and a collection of verse, The Palace of Oblivion.
Review Quotes: "Davidson's intricate meditation on twilight in European art and literature . . . is at once richly satisfying and as elusive as a ghost. . . . Like all good writers, he reveals the sheer strangeness of much that our eyes usually slide over."-- "Literary Review"