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“... This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall; a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping heavily into the street. The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison ...”

“... In the mornings, there is a clinging, overripe smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving like swallows ...”

“... Iain Sinclair, in the profane spirit of Surrealism, has chosen to decorate the endpapers of his new work of fiction with a dozen unutterably strange picture-postcards. They show scenes such as that of six men, heavily veiled, veils held down by brimmed hats, posed with long-barrelled rifles. And two men in grass skirts, with feathers in their hair, intent on a game of billiards ...”

“... It is best to read Iain Sinclair’s work out of the corner of your eye. The action takes place on the peripheries; it disintegrates if you concentrate too hard on the middle. Dining on Stones, a postmodern thriller for geeky pedestrians, doesn’t really have a story; Sinclair’s idea of a plot is a walk ...”

“... the urban economy as much as in any flourishing Indian restaurant, variety is the spice of life. Iain Sinclair is himself no stranger to marginal commerce, but his route into Spitalfields is different. A glance at his early writings reveals that he started out in the ‘Poundian revolution’. Here are ample signs of American contamination: the ...”

“... That Iain Sinclair, poet, essayist, impresario and weaver of arcane fictions, is one of the more generous spirits around is obvious from this brave, demanding and often flummoxing anthology. Thirty or forty poets are represented; most have remained in relative obscurity, partly because their work fell on deaf ears, partly because they believed in the notion of a mainstream which intellectual loyalties led them to disparage quicker than it could disparage them ...”

“... I’m so glad to hear that your son is having some success at last, Mrs Sinclair,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘We all follow his career with the greatest interest.’ Downriver XII, ‘The Sexing of Stones’ The other week, I went up to the Compendium bookshop in Camden Town, London NW1, to hear Iain Sinclair read from his latest novel ...”

“... historical incident, all of which freely, and somehow effortlessly, intermingle. His poetry, Iain Sinclair once suggested, resembles ‘floating translucent landscape (much of it out there underwater, a distance we can’t quite reach)’. Harwood’s influences have by now been so thoroughly assimilated that on first encountering the poetry one ...”

“... British avant-garde can be traced in the fugitive magazines whose titles turn up litany-like in Iain Sinclair’s books: the Groseteste Review, the English Intelligencer, Angel Exhaust. The history of Irish avant-garde journals is even more elusive. There was Francis Stuart and Cecil Salkeld’s To-morrow, which lived up to its title, just about, by ...”

“... peaceful self-help and direct action within existing society. Class War, discussed here by Iain Sinclair, is an anthology of the paper Class War, based on violent confrontation with existing society. They share virtually nothing apart from the word ‘anarchism’ – so are both or either or neither of them anarchist? Marshall prefers the ...”

“... visual identity and seemed to consolidate the atmosphere around them. He is, you might say, the Iain Sinclair of album covers, a small-town Corbusier of layouts and logos, and anyone attentive to the development of British design since then will see his influence just about everywhere.Saville has worked for all sorts of client – fashion designer ...”

“... at night, you gain access to a moody contemporary version of Weegee’s front-lit glamour. This is Iain Sinclair territory. It’s immediately familiar, both repetitive and slightly nightmarish – particularly if, like me, you can’t drive and rely on the memory of back-seat car journeys to know what a motorway can be. The language has a similar lulling ...”

“... habits of thought of which hyperlinking and googling are part. Sometimes, as in the work of Iain Sinclair and his imitators, there can be a kind of paranoia: everything connects up in sinister or unseen ways. In Sebald’s case, where the tone is more melancholy than paranoid, less is left out and there are more loose ends. There’s also an ...”

“... is more Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as we study it, the map changes and ...”