Max said: The Sea of Love is a book that samples the cultures I have lived in over the decades. It is also a book that samples the way I work, how that work has evolved, and how processes of obsessive behaviour have been compressed into research via the device of the book. It interrogates the human condition, desire, family, territorial peculiarity and otherness. The opening chapter reflects the brutal "you can only worship me, you cannot leave me" love the populist despot offers an entire population, enforcing loyalty to Big Brother through fear, security and systematic brainwashing. The following chapter riffs off an open-ended love obsession with Francisco de Goya's La Maja: the first time I saw her in the flesh, at the Prado Museum, I stood before her for hours, longing for the impossible catharsis of requited love.