This is the kind of book I wish I had the chance to sit down and discuss with the author. It is accessible without sacrificing academic rigour, astute and ingenious in its close readings and balances breadth with depth admirably. But why on earth does it have a singular title, given that the whole thrust of the argument depends on silence being a multifarious phenomenon?

The reader encounters the enigma of silence as rapture, failure, slyness, avoidance, challenge. Silence is both built into literature and a kind of enwrapping, enclosing ocean, out of which words will emerge and back into which they will sink, rather like the primordial chaos at the beginning of Genesis. Speaking or writing about silence is inherently paradoxical. Many years ago I interviewed A.S. Byatt, who made a throwaway remark about turning down Celebrity University Challenge. When I expressed surprise, she beamed, sounding like Sister Monica Joan in Call the Midwife: ‘But what if I were struck by nominal aphasia at a crucial moment?’ I silently thought that if you can use that term your chances of suffering from it are quite slender.

Kate McLoughlin’s scope is pleasingly traditional. Indeed, it tacks to the old Oxford University English Language and Literature syllabus fairly closely: Anglo-Saxon; medieval (lullabies and lyrics but not much Langland or Chaucer); and the Renaissance, with a separate section on Shakespeare. I enjoyed her observation that Shakespeare only once specifies silence in a stage direction – in Coriolanus, a play much concerned with not wishing to pander or display. We then trot through the Metaphysical poets, Milton and the Augustans, the Romantics, the Victorians and the Modernists. There are some judicious inclusions – Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Gaskell and Christina Rossetti being given due prominence.

As for the present, though, less would have been more. There is a little tsk for Robert Macfarlane when he writes: ‘Sometimes on top of a mountain I just say “Wow”.’ McLoughlin counters: ‘I wonder why he says “Wow”: that is, why he says anything at all’, which adds little. On the other hand, given the recent revelations about Raynor Winn and The Salt Path, ‘no comment’ might have been preferable to her inclusion. That doesn’t detract from the very heartening space given to writers such as J.H. Prynne, B.S. Johnson, S.J. Fowler and Dom Sylvester Houédard.

I was reminded of Meister Eckhart – ‘Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence’ – but also MacDiarmid’s Drunk Man, whose loquacious, exuberant gallimaufry of a poem ends: ‘O I ha’e Silence left.’ It is the unsaid Alpha and Omega.