"Scotland’s preeminent poet of both the mountain and the capital’s pavement. Doubleness is a Scottish art: Passion and Calvinism; the west and the east; the highlands and the lowlands. MacCaig embraces this split with true affection and verve. (See also: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.)"

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn wasn’t a new book when my mother was young. It’s still luminous, the story of Francie Nolan struggling up in a tenement slum through the cracks in the pavement to reach the sun. It may be the best book I’ve ever read about poverty, parenthood, the immigrant experience, and just about everything else. My firstborn daughter is named Francie Nolan."

"This is a very personal selection. I was 13 years old and was falling into bad musical company - Red Hot Chili Peppers, Limp Bizkit and all the music that the hot boys at school were into - and coming home and threatening to get a Chili Pepper tattoo. I think my father had had enough and told me to listen to an album as he thought I might like it. He needed to pull something out of the bag and steer me onto a good path. My dad loved Pavement. It was the first time I had heard music that I felt was mine. I didn't know anything about the band – whether they were dead or alive. It didn't matter that it was music that my friends weren't listening too – it eclipsed all of that. I just remember being really struck by how the songs would trickle in all these different kinds of directions and would have all of these weird guitar solos. They weren't as formulaic as the guitar songs I was used to from all of the terrible music I was listening to at school. I became absolutely fascinated with Pavement and I didn't care that no one at school had heard of them. It was the beginning of having the courage to say, "This is the music I like and I don't care if anyone puts it down.""

"For me Pavement were my favourite band of the 90s and they really defined the 90s for me better than Nirvana or any other band, because they were shambolic and had elements of all the things that came right before them like the Sonic Youth era and the grunge period. Malkmus was such a literary voice and they were such a great band in spite of being everyone living in a different city. They hardly ever rehearsed and their songs were always thrown together in some way but they made this music that inspired me almost more so than anybody else at the time. I would listen to them and see them live and it really moved me in a very basic sense. I felt it was very sophisticated in spite of it being a little shambling and rambling on stage and maybe that was part of it. They were never really a tight band. They never cared to be a tight band. On stage things were a little bit messy and blurry and that maybe was part of their charm, it showed that that didn’t matter in a way. What they were getting across was something that was nothing to do with whether they were a tight rock band with heavy riffs or whatever. Sonic Youth always prided ourselves on being really well rehearsed. We were super rehearsed most of the time and could really kick it out and Pavement was not like that at all. Yet they were really impressive and powerful in this kind of shambling way. I always loved the songs."