"Before I read Achebe as a child in Nigeria, I read only foreign children’s books, and so I wrote about the same things I was reading – all my characters were White and the stories were set in England or a generic Westernised country. I had not read books that featured people like me, so I thought that books couldn’t include people like me. Until I discovered Achebe. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course – I was too young to be consciously aware of that sort of thing – but later I would realise that reading Achebe was a turning point. It made me see that it was, in fact, possible for people of colour to exist within literature. Arrow of God has remained one of my favourite novels. Set in 1920s Igboland, it tells the story of a remarkable priest, Ezeulu, and a British administrator, and the ways in which colonialism brought not only political but cultural changes. It is funny and absorbing, moving and beautiful. I love this book."

"I love what he was trying to say in that song, it touched me. He was trying to connect people and give them this earthy feeling - that we're all connected in some way. And the melody is just incredible. “The funny thing about this song is that you can drop it mid-set, maybe mix it into SVW's “Right Here” to keep it moving. You’ve got to find ways! That's the beauty of the whole DJing thing. Why not drop “Nice & Slow” and then the tempo of “Human Nature” is around 60, 63, 64 BPM. If you double it, it's the same speed as a fast dance tune, so you can just put a dance beat underneath and then you're in the mix. So this one I try and play out when I can. “The sample was used everywhere too, and this is one of the things I love about hip hop. The ability to take a classic and flip it. It's what makes DJing so great too."

"Next is a documentary called Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, which is a story of then and now, of concentration camps. That had a major influence on me, again, for the poetry, if you can call it that, of the documentary, but also the way he used time, the way he used two time zones, two sets of material, to make his point, and to give the film, which obviously had some astounding, alarming images in it, but without a lot of babble, of explanation, by contrasting what it once was and what it is now. It was very moving to me, and I think that was inspirational, again, in the [Up] films I did with these children, which I’m still doing. But I could see how you could time travel in documentary, and it makes both sets of material more powerful. Of course, the film is incredibly powerful anyway. But nonetheless, he’d found a style of doing it, a way of doing it… It’s just, the power of those images, without endless babble, was, to me, a very strong lesson."