"Its bathroom-reading title belies this astonishing, hilarious analysis of reading, memory, shame and the everyday fraud of shared experience — the illusion of consensus that is the glue of our conversational social contract. Written by a drolly self-effacing French professor of literature."

"A Clockwork Orange, of course, was like the ultimate film for an adolescent to see. I watched [Malcolm McDowell’s] performance in that, and it had such an impact on me that I would glue an eyelash on my eye and then go to school with one eyelash. My father really lost his patience with that one. He said, “You gotta take that eyelash off. You’re not going to school like that.”"

"Kiarostami’s world-beating mystery is less about method and meta than the filmmaker usually prefers, but the immediacy of its peril and intimacy of its reality are pure soul glue. Such is the film’s veracity that I didn’t see the three-part schematic construction of it until I’d seen it four times, by which point it ceased to make a difference. The ending, for simply being itself without apologies, is peerless."

"This is another classic record that shaped a lot of what we did, I guess. You get those songs sometimes where you hear the sound of it and think something has happened here. Whether it's the glue or whatever that's given it this sound - and I get that with 'Crosseyed And Painless'. Whether it's loops or samples I don't know but it comes across like a soundscape with everything working off everything else. That one track does so much in terms of hearing how records can be made."