John O'Loughlin is a Galway-born author who, at the age of 21/2, was brought over from Ireland to England by his Aldershot-born mother and grew up first in Hampshire and then in Surrey, where he attended a variety of state schools. Most of his adult life has been spent at different addresses in the London Borough of Haringey, north of the Thames, to which he moved from Surrey in 1974, and all but a few of his books have been written there, the majority of which, like this one, are of an intensely philosophical not to say metaphysical and even ideological nature.