"As far as the modernists go, this is neck and neck with Beckett for number ten (that’s cheating, I know), but Woolf must win. Like Baldwin, Woolf has made many a top 10 list, but again, there’s a reason: I know of no more gut-wrenching, soaring prose about shared consciousness, mortality and water. Truly a book for the cradle to the grave."

"David Lean again, in perhaps the best translation of a Dickens novel to the screen, and surely the greatest of Dickens’s novels too. Crisp, brilliantly cast, a flawless rendition of the period, and amazingly faithful to the novel, Great Expectations is the model that every Masterpiece Theater rendition of an English classic strives to emulate, only better, far better than that."

"“It’s by far my favourite film and so different to anything I’ve seen before. It feels like an artform in itself. I think I could just watch that movie and no other for the rest of my life and not feel as though I’d missed anything. It’s basically three men walking around a field. That’s all it is, yet it’s utterly mind- blowing.”"