"This is a searing novel set in 1930s America, and the story unfolds in just over 36 hours. It is a book about sex, alcohol, class, and dreamers. Devastating in its conclusion, it completely drew me into the atmosphere and pressure of what it must have been like to alive in America at that time. All details are present—the cocktails, the cars, and in this book most overwhelmingly, the unhappiness."

"Sciolino gives us an inside view of how seduction works in all areas of French life, from advertising to politics to interpersonal relationships. “La Seduction” at its core is just a way to appeal to someone by finding common ground, and no one does that like the French! And in my opinion, it’s so much more interesting than the brow-beating we resort to here in the USA."

"I love that Jules Dassin took an archetype like the mentor and turned him into the main character. One of the greatest heist films I’ve ever seen, Rififi employs character for the sake of plot progression, resulting in a unique economy of filmmaking. Pure entertainment. Plus, the details: padding a hammer not leaving matches or cigarette butts during a heist, catching debris with an umbrella. And that’s just one scene."

"Oh I just love Fantasia. I played that for my nephew when he was two, and I don’t believe in popping children in front of the television as a babysitter, but I feel like, you know what? “I’m introducing you to classical music; I’m introducing you to classic cartoons, so watch it!” It’s a beautiful way to take music and to take your mind to a place of no words."

"It just cuts in, doesn't it? It's like, 'what the fuck are you doing?' The lyrics are a bit cheesy, but it was written early on, and we forget that the early 80s were only a few years away from the mid-70s, when all really juicy stuff was happening. It's all connected. So you can forgive the cheesy lyrics, and it's a really fantastic song. Brilliant, really."

"Last summer we were playing some versions of Dark Side of the Moon that were more like our versions, that we did with my nephew [Star Death and White Dwarves] and Henry Rollins and Peaches. This summer we're playing another version that has some of the Wizard of Oz themes and ideas running through it, so that'll be a lot of fun. It's just great emotional music. Judy Garland, when they picked her to be the singer, and the embodiment of that longing... she's so perfect for that Dorothy character. There are bits on the Wizard of Oz soundtrack CD that I have - and it's an old CD, maybe 15, 20 years old - when you take the movie away and just hear her singing, and there's a song where she cries. I've put it on to a room full of people and they tear up, it's so real. There's not many pieces of music that can do that. She's so perfect, but it's not just the singing - she's an actor. She's on camera at the same time, she's wearing this ridiculous costume, there's fake backdrops behind her, there's a lot of elements that have gone into this thing, and so for her to be so pure, so potent: it's uncanny. That's why that movie is so good. There's a lot of fantastical, ridiculous, musical movies out there that, to me, are nauseating. Wizard of Oz should be one of those - out-dated, overdone, with horrible music – but it rises above what it's made of. It's unbelievable."

"It's an album that had a massive effect on me when I was young. I remember on Steve Lamacq's Roundtable, there was a track from Journal For Plague Lovers which a member of Wire completely slagged off. So this shows how much I actually like this album, because he obviously hated us and thought were just plod-rocking, rock-dinosaur philistines. But despite that I'm still going to quote this as a really influential album for me. A lot of people pick Pink Flag and Chairs Missing as their favourite records, but for me this is the apex of their achievement: they're still fusing really blunt-edge experimental rock with really abstract notions and wild ideologues and monologues of different sorts. There's a song on there called 'The 15th' which is just an amazing song; there's another song called 'The Other Window', which has a direct lineage from some of the Velvet Underground narrated songs like 'The Gift', and it's about this guy travelling on a train and outside there's an animal dying in a barbed-wire fence. There's another song called 'Two People In A Room' which is just fucking brutal. A lot of people like Wire then they're bleak or when people couldn't get a handle on what they were saying, but I think on this you can pin down the emotion to the record, pin down the marriage of experimental edge with rock. For me, it's one of the great lost post-punk records. It's an amazing record that never really gets written about. It was produced by Mike Thorne who never did as good a record again. And I just love the cover: it's got a very… almost Mondrian kind of vibe to it. It's really strange and quite unsettling. I just love the record."