"This early 20th century novel about a music hall dancer, a performance artist of that time, who measures her freedom between relationship and touring has not aged at all. No one writes about relationships as perceptively as Colette and very few write as well."

"Maybe it’s a thing to do with ageing, but I listen to classical music more and more, and there’s just so much. I chose this because I saw it at the Royal Festival Hall, and it was probably the most powerful performance of a piece of music that I’ve ever been to. Its 100 years old now isn’t it? I was reading that the other day and of course there are all those stories about how shocking it was at the time. I wonder how much of it was down to Stravinsky's hype at the time, that this music was making people so upset. I mean, if they were going to the concert they must have known vaguely what to expect. I love the myth around it all. It also does two of my favourite things. Intellectually it’s untouchable theoretically in the way it’s composed and how unrelated it is to anything that went before it and how revolutionary it was, yet when you listen to the music you don’t consider that at all. The reaction to the music has nothing to do with your brain, it’s purely emotional, and if you’re trying to listen to it and analyse it you are missing the point, you've just got to totally open yourself up to it."

"They were sampling Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, and all this music that I actually liked. And it was the way they did it as well: not giving a damn and taking whole lumps out of stuff. It was very challenging to what anyone expected from young black artists; the connections they were making in the music didn’t have that overlay that other hip-hop artists had of being dangerous and misogynistic. There was an amount of silliness in it. I found it incredibly engaging. Wire’s never really shared much taste as a band. In the beginning we would talk about music, but it diverged over the years. It’s about the work. It always has been. It’s never been about, “I’ve heard this record, let’s try to do that.” Whenever I try to do something that sounds like something else, it ends up sounding so far from it that nobody could understand how I made the connection."

"When I want to cheer myself up, I think of Ian Dury – the best lyricist in English music, who fused music hall and funk, the first Cockney rapper. The music is always there and the music is very good, but it’s easy to miss the joyous flow of words when you’re listening to it. That’s where Hallo Sausages: The Lyrics of Ian Dury, edited by his daughter, is sublimely useful. Along with great photographs and a tender memoir, it collects the words for all the songs. So you can actually read “Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part Three)”, and get all the brilliant internal rhymes: “Seeing Piccadilly, Fanny Smith and Willy / Being rather silly and porridge oats.” There’s that great exercise in admiration and mockery, “There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards” – people like Einstein and Van Gogh – with its running refrain: “Probably got help from their mum who had help from her mum.” And everyone’s favourite, “Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick” (“Two fat persons, click, click, click”). Who couldn’t love a songwriter who has a song called “Plaistow Patricia”? Actually, my favourite Dury song is not cheerful, but terribly sad, “You’ll See Glimpses”, which takes the form of a letter written by someone who has been locked up because his mind doesn’t work properly. This letter is utopian: the inmate lists everything he would do to sort out “the problems of the world”. It ends: “This has been got out by a friend.” Go and listen to it – Dury doesn’t sing but reads the words, jauntily. Yet it’s profoundly sad, and seems to me as great a work of art as any novel or short story of the last 40 years."