“A restlessness pervaded his slightest movements as he sat behind a desk in the small dusty office that overlooked the minarets of the Near East. The call of the muezzin cried and wailed in the distance…”

“Julian Bliss is surely a case for the progressive education movement, a shining example of nature versus nuture. At the age of five he decided to pick up a clarinet of all things, and learn to play it.”

“I found myself at the chic new concrete concourse that is Kings Cross at the hitherto unheard of hour of 8am, to catch a train to the unknown quantity of Middlethorpe Hall in deepest Yorkshire.”

You have snagged yourself a Valentine’s date with a beautiful, mysterious, curvaceous bundle of trouble. What’s an intelligent, urbane man about town to do by way of preparation? A few words of advice from Lady Lavinia…

The sun sets in Ibiza at around 9.57pm, and as the moon comes up so do I, surrounded by a rush and heaving mass of vibrating bass, boom, boom, boom and in my head there, I go, you, me, I, he, all at once.

My reactions to music are purely emotional: love, hatred or indifference. Music is only important in as much as it affects me and colours my responses to memory, bitter or happy. To me, many ‘important’ album reviews penned by the grown-up equivalent of rampant teenage boys leave me bored. It [...]

He said, our path is not clear. I said, I must find a path without you. Tied to another, he was not mine to claim with love, so I claimed my pride and drifted away, a mock turtle, drowning. The seasons will come and go, I shall walk to the [...]