Home of The Naughty Stories Series
Born in Poole, Dorset, in 1965, Sedley Proctor grew up in London and was educated in Winchester and Nottingham. In the 1990s, he worked in fringe theatre and was involved in productions of Macbeth and Bertolt Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities. His own play, Salt Lake Psycho about the notorious murderer, Gary Gilmore was put on at the now defunct Man in the Moon theatre in London, Chelsea. From the mid-nineties until 2013 he lived and worked as a teacher and translator in Southern Italy. In Italy he continued to experiment with his writing, devising an invented dialect, writing a blog satirizing the international politics of the early 2000s, collaborating on a screenplay with French writer, Claude Albanese, and performing his poetry in front of bemused locals and amused ex-pats. Apart from his own books, he writes under the aliases F. M. Frites and M. T. Sands.
He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. Machiavelli, the Prince, Chapter 15 “Is the report true?” “Yes, my lady,” said the messenger. “I am afraid it is. The Prince marches at the head of an army of five thousand.” “What else have you …
The Italian Ugo was a small man, and he could scarcely see over the battlements. Besides, the chainmail he was wearing was far too big for him and hung loosely down over his thin body. His helmet was too big for his head. He looked quite absurd, standing there and scarcely able to see over …
How do you remember your time in the dream? Is it static? – Of course, it is not. It seems it will go on forever and ever. And you never want to wake up.” Dante was almost euphoric. “Seriously, have you never experienced it? Time is not there in the dream as we understand it …
For the alchemist Nicholas Flamel it was liquid gold, aab-i-Hayat, or water of life, according to the Persians, Amrit Ras, juice of Soma, for the Hindus and uisce beathe, or whiskey breath for the Celts and for the Chinese: 酏 Yǐ. They said it was a miracle. The emperor awoke from a bad dream and …
Some devils have horns. Some choose to hide them under their hats. Others still are not averse to a game or two, as was Count Rosier who won the hand of Prince Mishkin’s daughter in a game of cards. Rosier did not care particularly for Prince Mishkin, but he always enjoyed cards. Any game he …
The bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball a piece of rag tied with string; and the wicket a parrot cage with the clean, dry corpse of a parrot inside… Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That Evans was captured trying – unsuccessfully – to set fire to his plane in No Man’s Land. …
K was writing in his room when his father came knocking at the door. He resisted the temptation to swear and sat there silently praying for him to go away. Eventually, he did, and K returned to his scribbling. But it was no good; he could not write. His father had interrupted his train of …
It was not Das Horst-Wessel Leid The flag high! The ranks tightly closed! Poverty marches and we march with it! But Ed zittern die morschen Knochen. How the frail bones tremble! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! I lost count of the number of times I heard the thwacks. It could have been three, it could have been …
After the war, the village used to be inundated with refugees. They stayed three or four months under the care of the Red Cross; then they were packed off to somewhere more important. The only one who ever stayed was Solda. Solda wasn’t a refugee, however; he was a vagrant. But that didn’t make any …
The idea, of course, has been done to death by my good friends here in the sanatorium. Although I do not feel remotely privileged, I even have precedents for what I am about to relate in Maupassant, and further back in Hoffman. But allow me to give you something of my background. My father met …