Mark has been writing about music and the arts since he was a teenager, following a range of passions that range from Delta Blues to film noir, Baroque music and opera to physical theatre. He’s also made documentaries in the UK, France, Germany and the USA, on a wide range of subjects that range from avant-garde composer Xenakis to the Bristol musician Tricky, from the painter Balthus to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He has never ceased to explore the ways in which people in the arts seek self-knowledge and transcendence be it Cary Grant’s LSD-fuelled therapy or Boy George’s voyage through addiction. He has just finished a book about his father’s very carefully planned suicide at 67, a meditation on the way we live and die. He’s very seldom been a cultural gun for hire, and follows his own instincts in a quest for the original and authentic. Most recently he has developed a practice as a Tarot reader – an intuitive tool for self-appraisal rather than divination