History is made at night

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984) might not seem to have too much in common as writers, but I wonder whether...

'Because all these serious faces’ll drive you mad, the only meaning is without meaning– Music blends with the heartbeat universe and we...

The sounds Of the Harlem night Drop one by one into stillness. The last player-piano is closed. The last victrola ceases with t...

My favourite Arthur Machen story is the The White People , published in 1899, featuring the diary of a young woman who has stumbled into the...

In the last weeks before he was drowned in 1822,    Percy Bysshe Shelley  wrote a series of poems inspired by his friend Jane Williams   an...

From Haruki Murakami's 'After Dark', 2004: 'The record ends. the automatic turntable lifts the needle, and the tone arm d...

Rita Tushingham and Michael York in Smashing Time (1967) 'Wild nights! Wild nights! Were I with thee, Wild nights should be ...

Enjoyed the spoken word event at the Hannah Barry Gallery in Peckham last night (actually a warehouse on the Copeland Industrial Estate). ...

1950s Soho clubs are one of the enduring obsessions of this site, but I didn't realise until recently that there was a specifically an...

'Spannered' is a new novel by Bert Random, published by Spannered Books , a new small press based in Bristol. Described on the co...

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens describes a gathering of the wealthy in pre-revolutionary France: 'But, the comfort was, th...

And in a wild and sudden dance We mocked at Time and Fate and Chance And swept out of the wattled hall And came to where the dewdrops fall A...

A rejoinder from William Gibson to the claim that the 20th century music industry was a natural state of affairs: 'In the early 1920s.....

Night stirs the trees With breathings of such music that they sway, Skirts, sleeves, tiaras, in the humming dark, Their highborn heads tossi...

'These were bright new monied times in which society people were encouraged to enjoy the primitive theatrics of those who appeared to be...

Langston Hughes was born on this day (1 February) in 1902. Here's his great poem Dream Variations (1926): To fling my arms wide In some...

'The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancin...

Hanif Kureishi's novel The Black Album (1995) is, among other things, a great snapshot of late 1980s London. Its main protagonist, Sha...

Alan Sillitoe died earlier this year, 50 years after he came to prominence with the classic post-war Northern working class novel, Saturday...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story The Popular Girl is centred around the figure of Yanci Bowman and her desire for more than the l...