However, human perception and the law often move at different speeds, and even though it was no longer a criminal offence to stroll or saunter at night, that did not prevent a newly formed police force from detaining anyone who gave cause for suspicion, even if that amounted to little more than looking a bit shifty. Its exploration of London’s nightwalkers begins in Shakespeare’s walled city, in which there was no good reason for anyone but the night watch to be out; it proceeds through the bohemian period, in which the noctavagant are actively resisting the strictures of clock-watching artisans. Just when you start to think it's getting dull, it picks up pace and you don't want the ride to end. However, in actuality, the criminalisation of nightwalking was only applied to the poor and homeless, whilst the prosperous were free to walk the dark streets at will. The author is obviously the owner of My Big Book of Literary Criticism as the majority of the text reads as an over enthusiastic student's first essay.

And my beliefs are very different to the author’s - so I’d have to disagree on some points but that hasn’t taken away the fact I’ve enjoyed this book! In conclusion, Nightwalking is an excellent addition to the burgeoning field of psychogeography as well as the established domains of literary criticism and historical narrative. This is my first experience reading John Lewis-Stempel and though I did have to slow down and reread some lines, to really 'get it', I found him stimulating and enjoyable company. As Virginia Woolf explained in her 1930 essay “Street Haunting”, to be in the streets when we have no real business being there allows us to shrug off the usual rules of life. How going outside at night without an explicit reason went from being a crime to a leisurely pastime of gentlefolk.Indeed, for all his close focus on particular authors, it is hard to escape the impression that the main character in Beaumont’s book is not a person but a place. I was surprised to read that he has won a prize for nature writing because to me the writing seemed awkward and forced but I must be in the minority - which is fine, we all enjoy different things. By the time you've stripped out poems by other authors, illustrations and footnotes to each walk giving other observations from the same season it's 30 pages long.

A walk in the deepest darkest night is something I would fear even in the countryside, but Lewis Stempel brings your senses alive with rich language and thought. If, if, you go out after the decline of the day… As the human world settles down each evening, nocturnal animals prepare to take back the countryside. In many works he is easy to miss, as he tends not to be a central or consistent figure, but rather one who skulks in the margins. It felt like there was no real purpose to the book until suddenly at the end I was being told light pollution can disrupt my sleep pattern and cause cancer. There was and is always something a little bit transgressive about daring to go out after dark, just for the pleasure of it.

I enjoyed the notes from individual nights more than the four cores stories, but was left confused by the format. No missing or damaged pages, no tears, possible very minimal creasing, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. I mean, when did you last think about how much public street lighting must have fundamentally changed public life? Some of the content was very tenuously related to London or night walking, or, for that matter, night or walking.