"Every single song on here is incredible and all their imagery really captured my imagination. I just loved that everything was black: they were in black leathers, the album cover was black and it was just so stylistically arresting for me. 

 I just loved how it sounded really smart too. He sounded to me both dangerous and educated, a [combination] I found really intriguing. I didn't always understand what the lyrics were about, but I got the sort of gist. I was a young teenage girl in Scotland and I'd grown up in a very conventional family and this just felt dangerous and exciting to me. It was the sort of life that I wanted to pursue – whatever is on that record, the sound of that record, that's what I wanted to pursue in my life. I wanted smart boys [laughs] dressed in black leather sounding dangerous. That's what I wanted, and that's what I went after [laughs]. "

"These two novels are about Frank Bascombe, a middle-aged man living in New Jersey. The Sportswriter begins a few years after the death of one of his children, and by the end of Independence Day, you’ve followed him for the next eight or so years. These are two of the greatest books about grief. Bascombe doesn’t sit in a corner and weep, but you know that his life has been affected by that loss. He used to be married; he used to have a family. It’s also incredibly accurate and illuminating about how men think. At the end of the first book, Bascombe wonders if one effect of life is to cover you in a residue “of all the things you’ve done and been and said and erred at.” In that instant, the veil lifts, and he feels a sense of being free again. But he also realizes that this lightness won’t last. And, worse, that it might not come again."