MUSIC
To most people that seems to mean pop - I have only ever been a true "fan" of one living artist - Marc Almond. This has been the case ever since the early 'eighties when he was still in Soft Cell and I was an adolescent Ur-Drama Queen with a feeling that I should have long black hair and jewellery everywhere.I even joined the fan club at one point and that's very unlike me. I knew a camp period was going to have to come so I decided to get it over with and MA provided my soundtrack - flailing around in the Sugar House in Lancaster to the thump of Bedsitter ... "mother thinks I'm getting better" we all howled - though I am afraid that nothing he has done in recent years has meant much to me. In fact, he's been crap.
The Magnetic Fields are now the Best Band in The World as far as I am concerned, Mr Stephin Merritt being the best lyricist of the last 50 years - and it will be no surprise to cognoscenti to discover that I also like Jacques Brel
Other dead artists are another matter however - see below.Most things written between 800 and 1820 appeal to me in some way. Especially Handel's Oratorios and anything done on authentic instruments (it is, frankly, obscene to see Bach done by the Berlin 8Philharmonic). 
Most forms of "Mediaeval" music hit the spot - for example I highly recommend the dance records of the Dufay Collective: A Dance in the Garden of Mirth (Chandos CD chan 9320)A L'Estampida (Continuum CD CCD 1042) both of which make you want to put on your best codpiece and pointy shoes and go down the Great Hall for a bop.
The contemplative (and exceedingly complex) works of the underrated religious houses of early europe are well worth the effort too - Hildegard of Bingen is pretty well known nowadays (as well known as a 12th century German Abbess is likely to be anyway) though Perotinus Magnus and the Schola of Notre Dame are not - there is a strange sort of link between them and Modern types like Michael Nyman and Philip Glass.
Must be the repetition and rhythm...
BOOKS
Among poets the Earl of Rochester is a hero - here is his Web Shrine - an ongoing project of mine. Be warned, some of it is extremely filthy... I have penned a few trifles myself, usually when something annoys me - though I claim no merit for them whatsoever. Then there is Philip Larkin, one of the finest english language poets of the last century. Pope, Dryden and the Metaphysicals - oh, and the ineffable Sonneteer himself.
I also admire John Aubrey, those who know me will recognise a few similarities...
History books usually get a look in - the current one was Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory (bit of a curate's egg if you ask me, I cannot recommend too highly his Citizens though - a superb book).Those on the go as of early 1999 are: Richard Fletcher's The Conversion of Europe 371-1386, Lisa Jardine's Worldy Goods - A New History of the Renaissance, Zoe Oldenbourg's Massacres at Montsegur and Joseph Bergin's biography of Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld. Of course the more observant amongst you will have noticed that it is not early 1999 any more, so here is the early 2000 version... On the go as of early 2000 are the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, which is the most fabulous bitchy, snobbish, gossipy account of Versailles in the reign of Louis XIV and XV and which, given there are three dense volumes of it, will take me a while to get through.
The even more observant will have noticed I've not updated this page for a while...
The read-in-the-toilet book is, as always, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (thanks to Ben I now have the whole thing in 11 volumes). Lighter matters include Pratchett of course (often not as lightweight as people think and sometimes not as deep as some would have you think). There are revisits to Jane Austen every now and then, plus the slow progress through Trollope's Barchester Chronicles. It should by now be no surprise to know that I am a great fan of the Classical Authors, especially Herodotos, Aristophanes, Martial and Juvenal. Many of their surviving texts can be found at the Tech Classics Archive.
PICTURES
Will be written about in due course.... for the moment let me merely say the names
Jan Van Eyck and Rogier Van der Weyden.... 