"Probably my absolute favourite. It's very influenced by American Graffiti - It's all in one day, it's the end of school, you've got all the teen cliques – but it's not a standard Hollywood feel good-fest, it's tough and quite sharp. You've got those first experiences of drugs and sex and fights and drinking, all to that great soundtrack. And I love all the stoner stuff, it's just really funny. Again, it's that extraordinary seventies American super liberal moment, which is a completely lost age. It recaptures that: 'Lets all hang out. Politics is over, disco is just around the corner."

"If the game is a film, then what are the rules? According to Renoir, who like Hoyle could load a deck with the best of ’em, you take a cast that presages Altman’s later operatic ensembles, you take an upstairs and downstairs at war through manner and subterfuge, you take a manor house with a camera that has an omniscient sweep—and you get one very fine film that can tell you more about social politics and film in a single two-hour period than Emily Post or a textbook can in a month or a lifetime."

"Much has been written about authoritarianism and its multiple manifestations, but little has been said about the ways in which people, even the most educated, seemingly open-minded people, internalise authoritarianism in their daily life. What happens to politics and politicians under a corrupt system is obvious. But what happens to a society and a culture under authoritarianism is a question less understood. The Polish poet, essayist and thinker Milosz wrote extensively about home, homeland, exile, memory, history…. As a writer who comes from a turbulent land of collective amnesia, I have always read him with a sense of affinity."