Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife

From the glamorous depravity of Studio 54 to the underground cabarets of Weimar Berlin, from Georgian London’s gaudy pleasure gardens to the birth of techno in post-industrial Detroit, a brilliantly researched history charting four centuries of nightlife, showing the fascinating evolution of how humans have gone out after dark There is a specific energy to it. Cafes and shops close their shutters. Darkness descends. “The air begins to tingle,” wrote John Dos Passos of twenties New York. “It’s tonight if you drink enough, talk enough, walk far enough, that the train of magical events will begin.” Nightlife, as defined by party historian Imogen Willetts, is “a commercial and secular environment designed to offer a variety of pleasures at night.” Up All Night traces its history back to a surprising starting point: seventeenth-century Japan, in a remote party destination built outside the shogun’s capital.