is there a sensible way to find backlinks to a website on google?

Not really through google itself anymore, the link: search is gone. What you can still do is search their brand name in quotes and exclude their own site with -site: in front of their domain to find pages that mention them, and a lot of those will link. For the actual backlink list you need a backlink tool. The free versions of most of them show the top 100 or so, which is often enough to see where a site gets its links.