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The Dark, a 2025 Start the Week broadcast, featured three visions of darkness:

• Night Vision by Jean Sprackland explore our complex relationship with the dark: what we fear and what we wish to banish. In the dark she finds a place of possibility and she asks what might we discover in the dark if we free our imagination.
• The photographer Jasper Goodall has been taking photographs in the dark for many years, mainly in forests and woodlands. His works draw on classical myth, European folklore and animistic belief systems.
• Christine Riding, Director of Collections and Research, talked about the images of scientific experiment and industrialisation in England on show in the National Gallery's exhibition showcasing the candlelight paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), whose exhibition I visited at the N|ational Gallery in London in March 2026.

Rather than curse the darkness, light a candle - Anonymous

Real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence - Marcel Proust

People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Don't fight darkness. Bring the light, and the darkness will disappear - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

The grave itself is but a covered bridge, leading from light to light, through a brief darkness - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness - Martin Luther King

What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness - M.C. Escher 

I have seen one century wane to lazy decadence, another grow from its corpse, groping towards darkness. None of those who work with blood and stars have convinced me that time’s narrative has an incline towards good - Hookland 

These are the days of wild roses. Dog rose and sweet briar straggle and flounce the fine dawn silks of palest pink around their thorns, which harden like knives in the summer sun. But the brightest and most eager of them is a brilliant white, five-pointed flower growing from green wires which tangle through the darknesses of hedge and hazel copse. For these few summer days, the simple white field roses with golden hubs draw the eye like flies into unknown, unvisited places. They float as strange light signals at the edge of chaos. Above them, the spaces between trees are full of other signals - Paul Evans