Sukhdev Sandhu's Night Haunts garners yet more praise, this time in the Independent.
Sandhu's model for nocturnal rambles was The Nights of London, a 1926 volume from HV Morton, “a beat—not Beat—journo”. The result is a luminous series of sketches in Orwellian style, from cabbies and sewer flushers ("fat is the bane of their lives") to exorcists and Thames bargers ("Nobody knows we're here. Nobody"). This book is an atmospheric and witty companion, especially for those who, like Sandhu, spend the dark hours awake.
Visit the Independent to read the review in full.
Watch Gareth Peirce discussing her work and Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice with Guardian legal affairs correspondent Afua Hirsch at the Frontline Club in London.
Owen Hatherley visits Euston station with Gavin Stamp for BBC Radio 4's "Front Row" show. Presenter John Wilson meets
Two architectural historians who have written new books about change, destruction and reinvention in the urban landscape. Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain laments much of the recent public building projects of the last two decade; Gavin Stamp's Lost Victorian Britain is a self-explanatory title.
William Skidelsky calls Sukhdev Sandhu's Night Haunts "unconventional, poetic and—yes—haunting", and makes it his paperback of the week.
Throughout, Sandhu is alive to the magic and mystery of the London night, qualities too often sacrificed to the modern tendency to equate "night" with "nightlife". Night, he argues, is now no longer a realm of enchantment, but a zone of tawdry entertainment, where opportunities for profit-making can be ruthlessly extended.
In the lead-up to the Afghanistan: Time to Go Protest on November 20, Counterfire will be publishing an extract from None of Us Were Like This Before by Joshua E. S. Phillips every day this week.
For more than three years, Phillips, an award-winning reporter, investigated the use of torture by US forces during the 'war on terror', and its impact on both civilians and soldiers.