Reading this book against the backdrop of a full-blooded attack in the United States on the idea of ‘sanctuary’ is a painful exercise. Both the history and the culture that Marina Warner discusses here feel, from one point of view, like survivals from a different era. From another, they feel like an urgent call to action. The book is diffuse, sometimes rather overloaded with references and digressions, but never dull. It documents a tight web of practices and ideals without which any culture is not only impoverished but also seriously damaged. Warner’s complex, cumulative engagement with the topic becomes itself a kind of migrant journey to whose rhythms the reader has to surrender.

The notion of sanctuary is pervasive in human cultures, visible in children’s games and ritual practices. Sanctuary is a space that is both strange and safe, an extra-territorial territory, removed from the hierarchies and systems that surround it. Anyone who is or has been made a stranger by violence, exclusion or dispossession can be secure there, at least while negotiating their long-term safety.

Warner begins with an outline of the history of this convention before moving on to a series of fascinating, erudite chapters on how various narrative and ritual traditions deal with displacement, transplantation, exile and memory. In the final section, she portrays language and storytelling as world-creating phenomena that always involve