If all of Iain Sinclair's books are ‘book-length footnotes to his other books’, as Nicholas Lezard contends, then it is necessary to outline the extent of the resultant entangled web. Intertextuality is a term first defined by Julia Kristeva to account for the perception that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’, and has been more generally used to describe the ways in which an author's text will beg, borrow and steal from the texts of others, indeed may be largely constituted by these webs of connection. While a range of intertextual strategies abound in Sinclair's work, the word ‘intratext’ might more accurately describe the way his poetry, fiction and non-fiction of the last thirty years is cross-referential, and how any part of this oeuvre may be connected to any other, as Lezard teasingly suggests. It is, to use the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizome, a non-hierarchical interconnected, growing, but sometimes contradictory, whole. To recognize the work in this way is important since my study will otherwise read his work by genre. The sense of connectivity – in terms of collage and juxtaposition – is not just the modus operandi of this work; it also informs how Sinclair has constructed a rule of thumb cultural theory, one to which I shall return several times.

Appropriately it was as an intertextual footnote that Sinclair first made his mark in the official world of letters. Turning to the back of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), inquisitive readers would have found a note informing them that the book's central conceit, the identification of occult powers emanating from the configuration of Hawkmoor's London churches, was derived from the odd-sounding book of poems and prose, Lud Heat, which Iain Sinclair had published in 1975. Ackroyd knew of this work because, like Sinclair, he had until this time been a member of a poetic avant-garde within which Sinclair's poetry was well regarded. In fact as early as 1976 one important little magazine, Poetry Information, had no difficulty in dubbing Sinclair ‘one of the most distinctive new voices on the UK poetry, prose and publishing scene’.