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“... terms trail from paragraph to paragraph, there is a sense of a place being reclaimed, as when Iain Sinclair rediscovered East London in the late 1970s. And, like Sinclair, Haslam has a polemical intention, a wish to set up his favourite city as the true, mongrel England against the green fields beyond: ‘The ...”

“... well as Walcott and Livingstone, the list includes Ben Okri, Michèle Roberts, Elizabeth Cook, Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth and Irvine Welsh), the administrators told me ‘family fun’ was to be the mood. So instead, would I give a talk about The Wobbly Tooth, a little children’s book I wrote thirty years ago when my son Conrad lost his first ...”

“... don who treats the town as an extension of his study, the ‘eccentric who had gone public’ (as Iain Sinclair describes his seedy book dealer, Dryfeld, in Downriver). At the other end of the scale were the obviously insane, who nonetheless continued to orbit a recognisable ‘centre’. The author of the Larousse article mentions the Prince de Condé ...”

“... would behave if they didn’t have anyone to work for, or to be judged by, in the future. When Iain Sinclair wrote about her novels for the LRB in 1994, he suggested that the reason this one never found its audience is that it’s missing the ‘pepper of spite’: there’s not enough anger in it, no one for us to enjoy hating. When Alfonso Cuarón ...”

“... in it, a cabalistic topographical pattern of the sort familiar from the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Iain Sinclair. She may be a husbandless housewife living in a rundown seaside resort, but she is no ordinary housewife from a seaside town. When Miller mentions his computer password, she immediately announces what hers would be if she had such a ...”

“... calibre, and Blacklock doesn’t oversell him as a pioneer, though he quotes encomia by Borges and Iain Sinclair. Hinton published an essay called ‘What Is the Fourth Dimension?’ a few years before the appearance in 1884 of Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland, in which a two-dimensional narrator, a Square, resists being educated into acceptance of a ...”

“... their magical meaning, and the tramps who haunt them – comes from the striking poem Lud Heat by Iain Sinclair, where the churches are taken to be geometrically interrelated in the form of a pentacle, the sorcerer’s five-pointed star. The poem is dark, dense and learned – Yeatsian, and maybe also Yatesian, in inspiration, amid much else. ...”

“... may be a saving grace. It has certainly yielded a rich crop for cherry-pickers. Writers such as Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher and Geoffrey Hill have found in The Anathemata elements that correspond to their own very different outlooks and have proved much of it to be relevant and capable of reinvention. There is a great deal that is interesting and ...”

“... the idea of signature applies to Nabokov; or, for that matter, to Bellow, Updike, Compton-Burnett, Iain Sinclair, Cormac McCarthy, Roth, Ozick, etc. (Lurking in Wood’s idea is the implication that modern critics and readers make too much of signature.) Nabokov’s signature is often both what initially attracts readers to his work, and what puts them ...”

“... exploited was busy voting Margaret Thatcher, madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992 The picture which Nigel Lawson draws of Thatcher herself is a remarkable testimony to the manner in which her government’s grand strategy was determined. Increasingly, ideas were translated into policy via will, whim and ...”

“... straight to the heart of Sensation. Richard Shone mentions, as literary and cinematic parallels, Iain Sinclair and Derek Jarman – I imagine he is thinking of Jubilee and, perhaps, The Last of England – and goes on to make a telling comparison between the Chelsea and Notting Hill Gate ambience of Sixties Pop Art (Hockney in Powys Square, right where ...”

“... truly worthwhile Place, and replace them with something static and unchangeable. However, unlike Iain Sinclair or the London ‘psychogeographers’, with their taste for pathetic fallacies and loathing for anything remotely new, Meades does not fetishise the spaces between. ‘I have to admit to a fondness for pitted former rolling stock dumped in ...”

“... as cultural criticism has a distinguished history, stretching from Defoe and Cobbett up to Iain Sinclair and Bill Bryson. In the 19th century, such writing was overlain by a style of critique that was less topographical and more frankly ethical or existential: extended essays on what a few carefully chosen examples of contemporary crassness and ...”

“... it all days of the week.This is closer in tone to a Pevsner guide than to psychogeography of the Iain Sinclair school.Waidner seems to be revisiting the distinction made by Iris Murdoch in Under the Net that some parts of London are necessary, others contingent. The ontological standing of Camden Town is high in Sterling Karat Gold, with the Fairfield ...”

“... which is Merseyside. His palette may be sombre, his manner austere. Beside a poet like Iain Sinclair – whose imploded epic Lud Heat offers the most magniloquent city poetry since Eliot – he is a Provincial watercolourist fading into grey. Yet the vistas of This Other Life, reaching (more than once) to a ‘depleted horizon’, are ...”