"Tony Williams was Miles Davis' drummer throughout the 60s and he was really young; he was only 17 when he started playing with Miles. As he entered his 20s, flower power and Jimi Hendrix was all kicking off and he wanted to get more amplified. He wanted to sing as well, which was a problem within The Tony Williams Lifetime, as he wasn't a great singer; he used to sing a quarter-tone flat. He's also the reason John McLaughlin moved to America. Tony heard him on some tape and invited him over, and he introduced him to Miles Davis. And the other member of The Tony Williams Lifetime was this amazing organist called Larry Young. He later had these funk hits like 'Turn Off The Lights' and he's probably more famous for that kind of thing, but he originally started off on Blue Note as this Jimmy Smith-type organist. His style comes from John Coltrane and in actual fact he used to practice with Coltrane. He had a real modernist approach to the organ. The thing about this band is that they did turn it up to 11. They really did over-amplify and distort things. There are no decent recordings of The Tony Williams Lifetime because it's all so overblown. It feels like it's on fire and it's so intense. The drumming is insane and the organ is about texture. This is a record that I've never got fed up with."

"The Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (who was born in Honduras, grew up in El Salvador, and now lives in Iowa City) should be much better known in the United States. Every book of his I have read in English has been differently original, differently demanding. He is an intense writer, whose short novels take fierce satiric hold of a fictional concept and squeeze and squeeze. His work is political but intimate, and no more so than in this early book, a work of homage to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Edgardo Vega, a Salvadoran professor living in Canada, returns to El Salvador to attend his mother’s funeral. In a bar, he sits and rants, for hours on end, to an interlocutor who has the author’s own name, about everything he finds detestable in Salvadoran life, from the country’s beer to its writers, from its food to its politics. It’s not the book I would recommend to a reader who had never encountered this unusual writer—that would be his great novella “Senselessness”—but it’s an interesting exercise in both imitation and self-exorcism (Castellanos Moya has said that he wrote it, in part, to rid himself of the influence of Bernhard); and if, like me, you are drawn to novelists who are bloody good ranters (Philip Roth being our great American example), you will be likewise drawn to this peculiarly compulsive novel."

"This is one of the first songs I can remember listening to over and over again as a little kid. I had ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Without You’ and they were my two favourite songs. I remember I would sit on the living room floor with my dad’s big headphones on, we had a massive CD player set and I would put it on and I’d just be… [gasps] I’d listen to it on repeat. “That was my first love of a pop ballad and I think those feelings were my first feelings of love in a way. I would just play it over and over and I think that was my first longing for wanting to create, but maybe not knowing that yet. Just being like ‘Oh my god, this is what I love.’ “It’s quite cool that it was Harry Nilsson, because I was just listening to what my parents were listening to at that time. I fucking love Harry Nilsson, he’s one of my favourite artists. Mariah Carey is a diva and she kills it, but it’s a different experience with the Mariah version. I love a diva and I love a good belt and an intense dramatic thing, but I like the more understated, simpler versions of things sometimes too. It’s like the Dolly Parton version of ‘I Will Always Love You’, there’s something so fucking beautiful and understated about that.”"

“I was so touched by this book. I relate to Ronda in such an intense way, like I’ve almost never related to anybody my age – at least in the media. As a female producer who won’t work with co-producers, sometimes I feel like I don’t have any peers. When I first discovered Ronda, I was so moved that she was literally responsible for women entering the Ultimate Fighting Championship; that she walked into a man’s world and made it her own, even though everybody acted like she was crazy and didn’t think she could do it, or claimed that she only got there because of her looks. Everything, from being constantly exhausted because of eating issues, to the shame at being considered too masculine, to having no coach or mentor willing to train you, is something I have dealt with being a woman in a man’s industry. I also completely understand the commitment to being an entertainer whilst simultaneously perfecting your craft, and the kind of vitriol that this inspires from people on either end of the spectrum. Her dedication to being an autodidact, and the degree to which she has to train mentally to deal with the long hours and exhausting work, really struck me as both instructive and deeply relatable. This book changed my life, and made me feel so much less alone. I think all girls should read it.”