dark [OE] The origins of dark are mysterious, although it may be related to German tarnen ‘to conceal’. Ideas of secrecy and mystery are behind such phrases as to keep someone in the dark [E17th] and a dark secret. A dark night of the soul is a period of great depression or soul-searching. The phrase was used by F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, in 1936: ‘In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.’ It originated in the title of a poem by the Spanish mystic and poet St John of the Cross (1542–91), Noche oscura, ‘Dark Night’, which was rendered by a Victorian translator as ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. One of the most famous opening lines in literature is ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, which begins Paul Clifford (1830) by the British novelist and politician Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Today his name is a byword for bad writing, and there is an annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing in the USA, but in his lifetime he was a successful writer who also became a reforming MP.