Our specialist times, with everyone confined to their own discipline, have left little room for the age-old view that, however transmuted, the issues of art and life belong together, or that, for all their differences, the arts have shared concerns: yet realism demands just such an outlook. This book offers an informal attempt to re-open closed borders by the established writer on music, Christopher Wintle. Through a host of aphorisms and thoughts it firstprobes people, politics, learning and the Gods. It then sketches out a Poetics in terms of style and idea, artists, critics, theory, performers, ethics, opera, sculpture, cinema and sport, before ending with a pair of Urban Fables. The volume includes a collection of Works with Music by the well-known Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco.