';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 todayhome 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.
An original reflection on shame as the central feeling of our age, the expression of an anger that is the necessary condition for new struggles.
How a supposedly apolitical form of philosophy owes its continuing power to social and political forces
What is the future of the image in the age of climate change and artificial technology? - from the highly acclaimed video artist and author of Duty Free Art
TONY BENN: FIREBRAND? NATIONAL TREASURE? A SOCIALIST FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
How might a twenty-first-century revolution against class society succeed?
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleepexplores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.
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