"For me this is possibly the greatest rock album of all time. It's a band playing at the absolute, height of their power. It's very ambitious: it's got elements of ska and funk, pop songs, soul, jazz, rockabilly, reggae - and in the end it's got this really great blues energetic vibe. It just seems like they tossed it off and lyrically it touches on a lot of different subjects. Some of the songs are very political: 'Spanish Bombs' is about the Spanish civil war, 'London Calling' itself - that song is such an anthem. The band had some commercial success after this album - with Combat Rock - but to me London Calling is the pinnacle of their song-writing. It is just a fantastic record with an iconic sleeve; that shot of Paul Simonon smashing his bass, it's just incredible. I saw The Clash play in Chicago when I was on tour and it was like electricity. They came out and they started with 'London Calling'. The place was rammed with 5,000+ people and it went OFF! It was as if a bomb dropped and it was one of the most exciting concerts I've ever seen!"

"This is proof that despite the difficulties it is possible to make a wonderful film from a wonderful but very long book, in this case Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which describes the dissolution of the great Sicilian ruling families during the 1860s. Set in the magnificent and sometimes crumbling palaces of Palermo and the arid Sicilian summer countryside, the film shows us the privileged but largely pointless lifestyle of the ruling elite, threatened by political change and their own inertia. One shot in the film encapsulates the message: when the central family arrives at their country estate exhausted from the grueling journey there, they enter the local church and sit in their family pew, along the length of the nave. The camera tracks across their faces, exhausted and gray with dust. The reference is unmistakable; they resemble those mummified bodies held in catacombs under the Capuchin monastery of Palermo, held upright in endless rows, many still in their nineteenth-, even eighteenth-century clothes, rotting and collapsing, covered in the dust of centuries. It is a beautiful example of how much can be said in a single camera shot when used by a master."