Notes on the Underground is one of those books you find yourself referencing and recommending everywhere – in the span of a month last year, I found myself quoting from it in two separate essays on wildly different topics. ‘Underground Aesthetics’ shows how the subterranean went from being a place of ugliness and terror to being an place of “magical beauty” and an object of romantic delight, by way of a fascinating discussion of sublimity and the gothic. It is an astonishing piece of imaginative prose, completely enchanting, in a book that deserves to be read by everyone. 

In Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, MIT Press, 2008