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Nightlife as a counter-archive: what Imogen Willetts gets right about the politics of going out
Imogen Willetts's Up All Night reframes 300 years of European nightlife as a record of who was allowed to gather, drink and dance. The book's pleasures are real, and so are its silences.

A staff-writer note: Monexus frames this as a book about politics dressed as a book about partying, and tries to keep the reviewer's caveat about geographic scope visible. The Guardian does the bulk of the heavy lifting here; the cultural-desk desk note is that any serious cultural reporting on nightlife in 2026 needs to read this against reporting on licensing reform and on scenes outside the Western European archive.
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