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“... become servants, who freely chose to come to America in the hope of improving their lives. But, as Roger Ekirch now explains in his splendid new book, a very large number of migrants did not want to leave 18th-century Britain at all. These were the convicts. Historians once thought that no more than thirty thousand felons were transported to the New ...”

“... from it. Or at least I had no idea of what it would be like to live in darkness until I read Roger Ekirch’s history of nighttime, which draws on accounts of the dark in early modern Europe. In a recent LRB John Demos pondered the perils of popular history, in which events constantly drive the story onwards, in which interpretations receive short ...”

“... towns in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Robertson devotes only a paragraph to it but as Roger Ekirch, a historian of the night, has observed, street lighting transformed the texture of urban life. It opened up the evening as a time for both labour and leisure, and provided a new and enduring metaphor. The coming of the light symbolised the ...”