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 dedicated to knitting up the ravelled web of time, ironing out bulges in the seamless garmet. His missions take him to scores of possible twentieth centuries, unruly and catastrophic, but none more so, I am sure, than Mr Moorcock's view of Original Reality…. His objectives are obliquely described, often to the point of impenetrability; his techniques range from necromancy to murder….

Some commentators have seen Cornelius as an ugly portent of the nihilistic world he inhabits…. This is a little like denouncing a policeman for an unwholesome interest in crime—which is not to deny that Mr Moorcock, like some coppers, may like his work too much. But the ironic distancing is mostly convincing: "Irony is no substitute for imagination", remarks Cornelius, smugly, knowing that his creator has, if anything, a surplus of both.

Below the irony and the ambiguities are some surprisingly old-fashioned decent liberal certainties: much the same could be said of James Bond and Cornelius's resemblance to a hyperkinetic Bond is more than parodic. He's a sentimentalist, more freely moved to tears than any character in literature since Lord Lundy. Under the pansexual permissiveness he's a fighter for order.