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Gardiner Crawford, with his reductions of thin northern light; or that of the abstract impressionist, John Scheuler, who painted out of Mallaig the subtitle of Richard Ingleby's book on Scheuler is: 'To the North'. There could have been something on Montesquieu, and perhaps more on Eric Linklater, particularly White Maa's Saga. And I would like to introduce Davidson to the sculpture of Steve Dilworth who paints from Ardslave in South Harris he is nothing if not animistic, northern, and humanistic. He could, too, have looked at some of the bleak cartoons of Edward Gorey; or at secondary works with northern content, which go beyond the themes of Arctic expeditions such as Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams or Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind. But any fool can criticise a book by pointing out what is not in it, and Davidson would have been equally at risk whether he had written fifty pages fewer or 200 pages more. The variable that takes The Idea of North beyond being merely clever or wise to being a beautiful book is that Davidson is a figure in the canvas he paints. The materials he presents to scholars are interspersed with vivid anecdotes about his own and his partner's experience, and their life at Dalgety in Aberdeenshire. A holiday in the northern Netherlands slides easily into a comment on Caspar David Friedrich's Moon Watchers. A comment on a 1936 James Mackintosh,Patrick landscape slips into a reflection on a photograph of Davidson's father in an evocation of the lost rural Scotland of the interwar years. Some will criticise Davidson for this interpolation of the personal into the scholarly but for me it is his greatest competitive advantage. He ends with a magnificent couple of pages entitled 'Keeping the Twilight', which is a description from his study of the fading hours of a northern winter day. His last two sentences are a perfect abstract-expressionist description of 'north', or at least of my north, real and metaphysical at the same time: 'A block of dusk above a block of moor. A smear of dark above a line of snow

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