With the introduction of tobacco England woke up from a long sleep. Men who had hitherto only concerned themselves with the narrow things of home put a pipe into their mouths and became philosophers. Poets and dramatists smoked until all ignoble ideas were driven from them. Petty jealousies no longer had hold of statesmen, who smoked, and agreed to work together for the public weal. Soldiers and sailors felt, when engaged with a foreign foe, that they were fighting for their pipes. The whole country was stirred by the ambition to live up to tobacco.

There are many great books and countless weird ones. Yet there few great weird books. Sex and Character is one of them, the product of a tortured genius. Or at least of someone devoted to the role.

"I want to say something to you or write something about you that would be as beautiful in itself as the life I would have led with you had you loved me." --Paul Potts in Dante Called You Beatrice.

Had the Onyx Club group recorded, Wallington might well have been widely remembered like Al Haig, as a formidable player on some of the most influential sides ever cut. But it wasn't to be.

The Unseen was made as a personal mix tape and never intended to be released commercially. But when Peanut Butter Wolf heard it, he knew it would find an audience.

Those who disparage liberalism and the movements of the 1960s era generally avoid speaking of liberalism's victories: the end of separate facilities for blacks in the South, voting rights unhindered by poll taxes and "citizenship tests" and, gosh, the end of girdles on secretaries who were expected to take dictation in the boss's lap.

Here in New York, where we once consumed so many oysters that Pearl Street takes its name from its former function as the dumping-ground of the city's nightly harvest of shells, we should be a little more down-to-earth.

The women on the cassette cover didn't look like the plastic women I had seen on MTV but like women that you could actually meet. I needed this album. It was called Country Life by the band Roxy Music. It was better than porn.

Having purchased my first Hoagy Carmichael CD, I could ignore the irksome Hit Parade orchestral fluff that marred some of the tunes and delight in some of the greatest songs in the annals of American popular music.

All that said, when you read The Revenge For Love you realize why Hemingway described Lewis in A Moveable Feast as having "the look of an unsuccessful rapist". Hemingway had to slander him. I think it's a very safe bet that Hemingway read The Revenge for Love and knew that he could never write a work of fiction on its level.

Yes, I'm talking about the early acid phase of rock, just before the head culture was slipped into the media's mass-cult fold with the invention of the hippie, beginning the slippery slope from doper to yuppie culture

I mean no offense to him by calling him perverse; he was something of a pathological liar and a compulsive philanderer, and a confirmed contrarian.