"This is one of the most bizarre, exhilarating, strange, intense books I've ever read. I mean all of this in a good way. The book's chapters are fractured looks at an even more fractured family. The book feels less like a story about them and more like a lived experience inside their psyche. Each chapter reads like a short experimental film about each character. They are beautiful, poetic abstractions on the human condition."

"This still feels like one of the most radical books I’ve ever read. It’s considered to be the first existential novel. It’s the memoir of a nameless retired civil servant in Saint Petersburg who’s staging a protest against rational thought and says things like “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.”"

"Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, and Nicholas Ray: the film-noir hat trick. Based on Dorothy B. Hughes’s very different but equally brilliant novel, it’s doomy, romantic, pitch-black, and unforgettable. The Criterion extras here are particularly superb, with special attention to the movie’s turbulent backstory (Ray and Grahame were divorcing during production). This is the movie for which I’m most intensely evangelical. It feels as vital now as it did a half century ago."

"This is the unedited and unadulterated version of the stories that made up Isherwood’s books Goodbye To Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains, which were the source material for the play I Am A Camera and later the musical Cabaret. I find it fascinating that Isherwood still writes about himself in the third person. An interesting literary device, yet it feels like a smokescreen and leaves you wondering how much more there is to tell."

"Bob [Hardy, bassist] and I used to work in the same kitchen. This is one of the songs we bonded over. It’s unconventional, but it feels honest. It’s deceptively simple. It’s got a straightforward poppy feel about it, but it’s actually really cool and interesting. It reminds me of being back in the kitchen in Groucho Saint Jude’s in the year 2000 with Bob washing the dishes and me cooking the self-saucing chocolate pudding."

"Edith Wharton’s use of language alone isn’t easily paralleled. She takes you into this woman’s life and makes you feel for her while showcasing her shallowness, materialism, and lack of honor. It is a timeless story we have seen play out for hundreds of years — yet, it feels like it would only apply to modern day society in the form of a Kardashian. Her turn of phrase and sentence structure are beautiful."