A BOOK TO LINGER OVER: REVIEW BY SHEILA WILD

 A series of memoirs drawn from the author's 30 years' of notes about places, the essays are grounded in Davidson's house in Aberdeenshire, but roam across the history and aestetic of Northern Europe. He describes it as 'a set of memorials and notations, of attempts to frame moments of recollected time, "out of time."'

Davidson is Professor of Art History at the University of Aberdeen, so it's no surprise that he writes with a painterly hand. And his language is musical, elegant; glowing with a cool Northern light. He writes of exile and unconventionality, of forgotten thoughts and forgotten arts. The book speaks too of a privileged life, that of drawing-rooms and drinks parties, where the clock in the hall is approaching the end of its second century. This aura of privilege deepens the shadows of loss that permeate his attentiveness to place.

I know immediately many of the locations Davidson writes about; know too some of the forgotten art forms: the Spar Boxes produced by the miners of the North Pennines; the sandstone inscriptions of Orkney. I came to the book as a Northerner, with a Northerner's scepticism, expecting to be disappointed, but finding interest and delight in every sentence. This is a book to linger over.