Is [Michael Moorcock's The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius] the overdue last instalment of the Cornelius saga (The Final Programme, A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin)?… Can Lives and Times be a transmogrification of what admirers and cultists have been awaiting under the provisional title of "The Condition of Muzak"? Probably not; names are one of the few near-constant things as our hero changes sexuality, sex, colour and condition at the drop of an acid, fleeing down the labyrinthine ways of uncountable alternate presents or near futures. Michael Moorcock gives no clue, but I think this must be seen as a spin-off, like the Jherek Carnelian of The Alien Heat….

What is Jerry Cornelius? A hero for our time, a man without qualities or with all of them—which amounts to the same thing…. His loyalties are partly given to the shadowy Time Centre, an organization...