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Tobias Wren’s The Broken Night sets out to persuade us that our ancestors routinely slept in two shifts, rising around midnight to pray, talk or tend the fire before returning to bed. Readers of social history will have met this claim before; Wren dresses it up handsomely but adds little that is new. More troubling is his handling of sources. A handful of diary entries and a couple of court records are made to carry an argument about whole centuries, and counter-examples are quietly left out. That said, Wren writes beautifully: his sentences are clean, unhurried and often very funny, and the book is a pleasure to read in a single sitting. And for anyone lying awake at three in the morning, there is real comfort in learning that waking in the night may be less a disorder than an inheritance. Few self-help manuals manage to be as genuinely soothing.