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Darkness: A Cultural History
By Nina Edwards
Reaktion books, 288pp, £16.99/$27.50

Buttons. Offal. Weeds. Nina Edwards has written books about all of them. Now she has turned her attention to darkness, producing a “cultural history” with three main objectives in mind: to discover how the idea of darkness, cultural and metaphorical, has come to wield “such power over our imagination”; to argue for the “conceptual richness” of darkness; and, quoting Edward Lear, to show that there can be truth and beauty “when awful darkness and silence reign”.

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