A copy of Nightwalking should be the indispensable handbook for creative writing classes from Ayrshire to East Anglia. Another message of this book might be that civilisation is to be found in the crepuscular limbo between night and day.

captivating, though incomplete, book that should inspire more literary journeys into the night.

[London is an...]Otherwise place entirely to its daytime incarnation, with different rules and different inhabitants. If this remains true of today's 24-hour, 21st-century metropolis, in which commuters setting out for work rub shoulders on the Tube platform with clubbers coming home, how much more so was it of the past versions of the city that lie buried beneath its streets?

In this magisterial, perambulatory survey Matthew Beaumont excavates strata upon strata of literary sources to help us find the answer. In the process he both explores the night side of some of English literature's greatest writers and resurrects many unjustly forgotten voices, who in their turn give flickering life to the denizens of London's darkness: the vagrant, the fallen, the alienated and the dispossessed. Above all, he releases an ancient, urban miasma that rises from the page, untroubled by electric illumination, allowing us to inhale what Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Dekker called "that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumaticke night throws abroad".