Iain Sinclair is one of those distinctive, oft-name-checked writers you're supposed to have read even though you probably haven't. I hadn't either until London Orbital and, being as it's long, dense, wordy and at £25 in hardback pretty expensive, I expect what you're hoping I'm going to say is, 'Naah. Wildly overrated. Don't bother.' Unfortunately, I can't. But I should warn you straightaway he's not an easy read. In some respects, he reminds me of this lit-crit book we all used to crib at university, The Everyman History of English Literature, in which the author, Peter Conrad, manages to cram so many heavyweight ideas into every sentence that one page is the equivalent of about a dozen of anyone else's, and takes a dozen times longer to decipher.

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