Last of the Light

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.