In her new book, Silence: A Literary History, Kate McLoughlin aims ‘to show that, over a span of twelve hundred years, English literature has spoken to us … through silences as well as through words’ – that the absence of speech and sound has often articulated the ‘profoundest aspects of our existence’, our deepest selves and our encounters with the sacred; with grief, love, nature and wonder. She does not argue her case directly but rather makes us notice the many different forms of silence (and their meanings) from text to text, and from one century to another.

This might sound rather colourless (literary histories can be so), but Silence is not. It scintillates with detail. McLoughlin pays powerful attention to all her chosen texts. For example, according to the Benedictine English mystic Augustine Baker (1575–1641), holy tears were like ‘a shower of raine into a fleece of