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I enjoyed his style of writing, a combination of first hand experience, and a wealth of knowledge all mixed with historical knowledge and quotations. Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography.There was and is always something a little bit transgressive about daring to go out after dark, just for the pleasure of it. Es gibt immer mehr Licht, die die Nacht zwar nicht zum Tag macht, aber trotzdem wird es zum Beispiel immer schwieriger, nachts die Sterne zu sehen. His writing is overly literary and self important - seeing the Forward was written by Will Self was fair warning, I suppose - making large chunks of the book almost unreadable. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised when a book doesn't give me what I thought I was getting into, so I pressed on. However, these divisions were not always unambiguous, creating a liminal space in which the different classes could intermingle and consume the unique offerings of the night.

Some sleepless nights I take the dog out, into the 3am city stillness and hope to see an old spirit avoiding eye contact under his hat coming the other way. Sorry Mr Beaumont, this wasn't my bag, although I did learn some new bizarre words such as obnubilate! Were the core stories amalgams of the notes from individual dates (combined or inspired by each season), or a single especially notable one chosen to expand on?

The reality of this offering however was a slow, turgid, heavy style of writing which was so ponderous - I got irritated, lost interest, found my whole effort to 'like' the book quite ludicrous. Indeed, the etymology of the terms ‘noctivagant’ and ‘vagrant’ hints at the notion of straying beyond established boundaries, and the night watchmen who were charged with protecting the city were often corrupt.

The introduction holds so much potential for a riveting read, and yes, there are the occasional paragraphs of interesting material, but this is not the book I wanted. There were some lovely descriptions and interesting anecdotes but this was essentially a jumble of ideas. The joy of Beaumont’s book is the way it illuminates both literature and urban politics through the splendors and panics of their nighttime journeys. However, if you are inclined to give it a try, it more than pays off your time and effort as it is an intriguing study. This results in plenty of cultural history, such as a magazine article from 1780 that gravely advised its readers not to adopt “the sauntering gait of a lazy Spaniard”, but it also means showing how often authors themselves have been creatures of the night.

By the end, it's the philosophical, social and moral ambiguities of the city at night that stayed with me. 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. Listen closely, and it is possible to detect what Dickens described in Bleak House as “a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating”.