OUT NOW FROM VERSO:

NIGHTWALKING: A NOCTURNAL HISTORY OF LONDON

BY MATTHEW BEAUMONT

FOREWORD BY WILL SELF

A captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night, and the people they met.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1851-nightwalking

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MATTHEW BEAUMONT will be in conversation with Lauren Elkin about his latest book, Nightwalking.

London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL

Wednesday March 25th 2015

7.00pm-8.00pm

http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events/2015/3/nightwalking-matthew-beaumont-and-lauren-elkin

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REVIEWS:

“Clever, fascinating and somewhat relentlessly radical… Nightwalking is likely to become a zero milestone for the ramblings of the school of psychogeography.”—SPECTATOR http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9471742/dickenss-dark-side-walking-at-night-helped-ease-his-conscience-at-killing-off-characters/

“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 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/nightwalking-a-nocturnal-history-of-london-from-chaucer-to-dickens-by-matthew-beaumont-book-review-10072410.html

“Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography.”—FINANCIAL TIMES http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cb864f8e-be76-11e4-8036-00144feab7de.html#axzz3UvE10MND

“An important and lively book” TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/nightwalking-a-nocturnal-history-of-london-by-matthew-beaumont/2018658.article

“A historical guide to the capital, Beaumont details everything including the 'villainous' common nightwalkers and prostitutes of the middle ages and Charles Dickens’s time as an insomniac.” DAZED & CONFUSED http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/23946/1/an-aural-education-to-london-after-dark?utm_source=Link&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=RSSFeed&utm_term=an-aural-education-to-london-after-dark

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Visit our blog for a ‘night-time’ playlist chosen by Matthew Beaumont himself, as well as Verso staff picks. Features dubstep, post-punk, dream pop and more!

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1913-a-night-time-playlist-an-aural-education-to-london-after-dark-with-matthew-beaumont-and-verso-staff

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“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.

In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.

With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.

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Matthew Beaumont gives a lecture as part UCL's Urban Lab's Nocturnal City series, exploring how the introduction of gaslight and electric lighting into cities led to the expansion of urban night-time activity.

UCL, Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre, Malet Place, London, WC1H 0AT

Thursday March 26^th 2015

6.15pm-7.30pm

http://www.versobooks.com/events/1041-nightwalking

Walking London: Discovering the Capital’s History on Foot—Nightwalking and Rebel Footprints with Matthew Beaumont, Will Self and David Rosenberg

Sutton House, 2-4 Homerton High Street, Hackney, London, E9 6JQ

Wednesday April 15^th 2015

7.00pm-8.00pm

http://www.versobooks.com/events/1076-walking-london-discovering-the-capital-s-history-on-foot-nightwalking-and-rebel-footprints

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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 edited or co-edited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities.

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“One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics.” – Terry Eagleton

“Nothing less than a grand unifying theory of the counter-enlightenment.” – Will Self

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HARDBACK: MARCH 2015 / 496 pages / ISBN: 9781781687956 / £20 / $29.95 / $35 (Canada)

NIGHTWALKING is available at a 40% discount on our website, with free shipping and bundled ebook. Purchasing details here: http://www.versobooks.com/books/1851-nightwalking

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