It is now impossible to peregrinate across London without feeling immersed in an Iain Sinclair landscape populated by "beggars, confidence men and broken women". His books, such as Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital, have mapped the teeming city's "corrupt transformation" into "a fatally tainted heritage landscape". In these rollicking vignettes of London literary men Sinclair unearths the corpses of forgotten writers, breathing life back into them and into their dusty works. Sinclair, Trinity College Dublin graduate and former used-book salesman, has fished out two forgotten laureates of his beloved Hackney: Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton. He shows the same deep appreciation for the troubled John Healy of The Grass Arena, for whom the approval of the literati was short lived. Sinclair fits his own description as one of these "men of large sympathy, drawn as much to write as to act", a witness and celebrant of "the villains and wanderers of London, always present, moving at the edge of things, the limits of visibility".
