"I was on a panel at NYU a few years ago with Larson and enjoyed immensely listening to him talk about his craft. I’m also a Winston Churchill junkie, having recently finished Andrew Roberts’ 800-plus-page juggernaut. But this is a Churchill largely unseen in other works. It focuses on a finite time period as Britain, the last country standing after France falls, desperately tries to not just hang on until Churchill can convince the Yanks to join the fray, but to take the fight to Hitler. Larson has drawn on new material, some just recently released, to build upon the legendary status of a man who did enough during his life to justify three lives. The only historical figure who might have rivaled him in the energy and “nine lives of a cat” persona was Theodore Roosevelt. This book will reinforce many things you might have already known about the Second World War and Churchill’s place in it. But you will also learn many new things about that man and that time period that will compel you to find out more. A thoughtful, at times part funny and horrific, and scintillating read that I would recommend to all."

"I got into him a long time ago; again, around the time I was going to university. I think I had a collection that came out around then called Way To Blue. I remember really liking it but perhaps I was too young for it at the time. It wasn’t until a few years later that I went back to it and they’re all just genius. There’s not a bad song on any of those records but I particularly got into the story of him. It’s so sad, you just want to go back in time and try and change it. It must have been so frustrating for him to craft these... I don’t think anyone sounds like Nick Drake and I get furious when people say he’s a kind of folk musician because I just think that’s bullshit. [laughs] Well, maybe it’s not bullshit because he comes from a tradition of songs that have a kind of folk influence in the way that they’re played, and the use of the natural world with stories removed from modern society, I suppose that’s kind of folksy, but for me it’s a bit more, dare I say, a bit more special than that."

"Malle is one of my favorite directors. He flirts with genres, tries all sorts of things, travels all around the world, refuses to let go of documentary, his first love (or first milieu)—although his fiction movies are acclaimed. This film, close to his skin and past, is a strong coming-of-age work, set in France under Vichy. Often, in the middle of the day, I think of scenes from Au revoir les enfants, moments of grace like the restaurant sequence, with the mother. French officers burst into the place and ask for citizens’ papers. They find an old Jewish man dining quietly at his table and start to reprimand him, asking him if he knows how to read; the place is, of course, forbidden to “youtres,” as the young French officer says insolently. Suddenly, every patron at the restaurant starts yelling at the officers, insulting them (“Collabo!”), forcing them to leave. And then, among the clientele, German officers stand up and order them to exit the place. Strong turning point. That is exactly Malle, in there, striking again. Contrast, antagonism, emotions, brute emotions. The rest is craft and mastery. But emotions. That is what he aims for. That is what we get."

"I think that tune is such a perfectly crafted piece of music. The funny thing is there's two mixes. There's the Jamaican mix, and the Jamaican mix is tough but I do like the other mix too. I got to work with Tony Platt who was like the engineer at a lot of those sessions and he was telling me all sorts of stories. And then what the song was about, when he was living in London and he was hanging around in Soho. It makes so much sense now because when I was really playing this a lot was when I was spending a lot of time in Soho, going to Ronnie Scott's, learning my craft, learning to play drums and jazz, going to clubs, hanging out ‘til 4am. So I felt it, I could picture him being there like ‘Rahtid…’ Everyone's been out on the night bus and seen something and think did that just happen? So I've always had an affinity with that particular track, sonically and content wise. I think people don't often talk about that side of Bob, and they’ve made him out to be this ganja-smoking, peace-loving guy, that’s not really what he's about. He's very political and does a lot of social commentary."