This morning I woke up laughing from a dream. It was about two young men and their podcast. The gist of it was that they reviewed things. Not books but ephemera, offering waspish assessments of brochures, tickets, leaflets. ‘The Non-Literary Review’, they should have called it, though I don’t think that was in the dream. I tried to jot down the details before I forgot them. The pair were sneeringly critical of a flyer for a local dry cleaner: ‘just a jumble of fonts’. And they talked about expanding their remit to other things that rarely receive the attention of the pundit: sticks, rain, dirt.

Later, an email arrived asking if I’d like to contribute a chapter to a book about blank pages. I thought of my oneiric reviewers, turning their critical gaze away from the main event, evaluating the margins of literature instead. What would be their favourite blank pages? Sure, there’s the one in Tristram Shandy. Tristram, conscious of the infinite variety of erotic taste, declines to describe the attractions of the Widow Wadman and instead offers a page for the reader to draw her as we please: ‘Call for pen and ink – here’s paper ready to your hand. – Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind.’ But while the page that follows may be blank, it is certainly not empty of meaning. Blankness here is a joke, a surprise, just one of the visual tricks that are integral to that novel’s distinctive wit. It plays at what Jonathan Sawday calls ‘the perception of absence’. 

There is a wry short story by Karen Blixen called ‘The Blank Page’ that operates in the same (blank) space. In the gallery of an ancient hillside convent, the bridal sheets of the Portuguese infantas are displayed in a line that stretches back through the centuries, testifying to the