Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project
Iain Sinclair
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project
Beginning in his east London home many years before it will be invaded by the Olympian machinery of global capitalism, Sinclair strikes out near and far in search of the forgotten and erased. He travels from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford, crosses Morecambe Bay in the footsteps of drowned Chinese cockle pickers, and visits an Athenian, post-Olympics landscape of vast and deserted stadia. It is a story of incident and accident, of the curious meeting the bizarre.
2.3 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Travel |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
432 |
| RRP |
£20.00 |
| Date of Publication |
July 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0241144350 |
| Publisher |
Hamish Hamilton |
| |
Beginning in his east London home many years before it will be invaded by the Olympian machinery of global capitalism, Sinclair strikes out near and far in search of the forgotten and erased. He travels from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford, crosses Morecambe Bay in the footsteps of drowned Chinese cockle pickers, and visits an Athenian, post-Olympics landscape of vast and deserted stadia. It is a story of incident and accident, of the curious meeting the bizarre.
HACKNEY, THAT ROSE RED EMPIRE by Iain Sinclair
Reviews
The Sunday Telegraph
Jonathan Sale
"Ghost Milk is rather as I imagine a walk around Hackney or up the Thames with Sinclair must be: exhausting and exhilarating. His dazzling prose takes no prisoners. Sometimes going irritatingly over the top, his language is always heightened ... These excesses aside, Sinclair’s explorations by foot are highly engaging and anything but pedestrian."
03/07/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Leyla Sanai
"Infuriatingly undisciplined but embedded with nuggets of brilliance and of gorgeous urban poetry, Sinclair needs a ruthless editor to render his rambling wanderings more palatable."
17/07/2011
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The Times
Matthew Syed
"... I am not sure that Ghost Milk delivers. To be honest, I am not even sure what Ghost Milk is all about … By the end of Chapter 4 I was hyperventilating out of sheer epistemic confusion; by the end of Chapter 7 I simply wanted to stab myself in the eye ... I have little doubt that, for those who are sufficiently high on psychedelic drugs, this is splendid stuff."
18/06/2011
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The Financial Times
Dominic Sandbrook
"… even the sympathetic reader begins to weary of the relentless negativity of his tone and the overwrought cadences of his prose … One of the great ironies of Sinclair’s book is that although he attacks New Labour, quite rightly, for lacking a sense of history, his own leaves a lot to be desired. He waxes lyrical about the Festival of Britain but it does not seem to occur to him that modern London is partly formed from the detritus of other grand projects, from the grand boulevard of Regent Street to the great Victorian railway stations."
15/07/2011
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The Evening Standard
Richard Godwin
"Even the vaguest admission that some of us are actually quite looking forward to the Olympics might have helped. Or perhaps our Londons are less valid? Perhaps we simply lack his flighty genius? The deeper irony of Sinclair's writing is that he somehow misses the city as most of us experience it. He stands apart from the crowd, a lone wanderer. He seems to be against the change that animates cities over time. The effect is highly alienating."
30/06/2011
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The Independent
Owen Hatherley
"A vivid, disturbing, touching lost London is outlined here, but Sinclair's powers are weakening, worn down, settling too often for last-gang-in-town bathos: "in junkshop coats and Wellington boots, we are a time-travelling pre-Raphaelite coven rambling through a Tarkovskyan wilderness". Ghost Milk is often interrupted by extended accounts from others — Tom Baker, photographer Robin Maddock, painter Brigid Marlin, the bleak Chinese hotel diaries of artist Steve Dilworth. At best, they're a magnanimous offering of other voices; at worst, padding upon padding."
08/07/2011
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