The Last of the Light is a meditation on twilight in the Western arts and imagination, in thought, painting and literature. We enter a multifaceted twilight world, filled with the gloom haunted by Romantic poets and painters and the twilight lives of minority and overshadowed communities. The melancholy of smoky English autumn evenings is balanced by the midnight sun of northern European summers; the oppressive heat of August in mid-twentieth-century Spain is ranged against the shadowy grandeur of winter in London.