Because Lex Runciman gives himself to it with such unreserved and, more distinctively, unembarrassed attention, the domestic world - the world of the household, backyard, the neighbourhood street - is flooded with a pathos, a quality of light, a delicious and familiar beauty that one sees in the paintings of Vermeer. In the range of its ideas and responses, in the gravity of its concerns, this book is refreshingly, disarmingly large.