"Magic. Weird, wilful. They obviously didn't know quite what they were doing. It's splendid. I saw them twice in '72, once when they first came on tour and it was dark, the audience didn't even applaud until the DJ put 'Virginia Plain' on at the end, it was astonishing. The second time with the whole outfits, the choreography and a celebration of success. Fantastic record, great lyrics. All of these things have great lyrics, of course... apart from 'Hallogallo'. When Wire supported Roxy Music later it wasn't quite what we thought we'd signed up to. I loved what they did with Eno, it was the combination, the clash... the power of Paul Thompson, all of it, the imagination. It's understanding, and putting it into practice. It's so wilful, it's quite sexy really."

"I’m gonna have to say Mary Poppins. I’m really gonna say it. If it was on right now, I would hang up on you and start watching it. There’s no way I could ever not watch it if it was on, so I think that’s a sign of it being one of your top five. It’s so… merry. You can’t watch that and not feel good, and I love Glynis Johns, the woman who plays the mother, and I love Julie Andrews. I mean, when it was windy in Oklahoma City when I was a kid, I used to get my umbrella and go out and try to fly. I think I actually did a few times, but don’t tell anybody. Just the magic of it all. I love it."

"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."

"I know that the novella "Tonio Kroger" is not Thomas Mann’s greatest work. There is some part of me that feels that I should be putting up “Buddenbrooks” or “The Magic Mountain” here. And there’s a strong case for “Death in Venice,” too. But this is the book of his that felled me completely when I read it as a German student in my teens. All Mann’s enduring themes are here: the struggle between duty and love, between the febrile pleasure and teutonic responsibility; and the lethal vulnerability of the lover, set against the wanton cruel power of the beloved. It’s an anguished worldview, which is what spoke so directly to the adolescent reader I was, but no one reads Thomas Mann for woo-woo life-enhancing sentimentality."