Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has also edited Restless Cities (2010). He lives and walks in London.
Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography. - Financial Times A wonderful book, that has many fascinating things to say about the night-time life of our capital down the ages. Rarely has a book on the subject of darkness been so illuminating; all insomniacs should read it. - Standard 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 - Independent An important and lively book. - Times Higher Education Supplement The joy of Beaumont's book is the way it illuminates both literature and urban politics through the splendors and panics of their nighttime journeys. Flavorwire Rarely has a book about darkness been so illuminating. Ian Thomson, Spectator, Books of the Year