Sequestered in rural Gloucestershire, UK, Peter Childs is starting his seventh decade. Having devoted a life to teaching English and professing about literature, he is the author or editor of dozens of previous books including The Twentieth Century in Poetry and the Encyclopaedia of Contemporary British Culture. Like many of his peers, he has always found music the purest source of shared pleasure and the true solace of the inner life of the soul. Unwilling to dance about architecture, he is delighted now to be writing about the records he loves.