A manuscript by the music critic John Clare is studded with moments of electrifying power and beauty: Sydney’s ‘brassy, maritime light’; ‘a ferry walked on tiny spines of light’; two drunks wrestle in the Cross, and one stretches the other’s ‘cardigan a yard at least’; a man frenziedly about to fuck a girl in a dark lane sees over a fence, through a kitchen window, ‘four people gravely playing cards’. Gravely. I take off my hat to that.