"Such a devastating and beautiful film. It’s interesting to see Amy Winehouse as a young girl with raw talent, and watch how, like a wave, she goes up and up and up and then crashes. As a viewer, you feel almost guilty to be watching her – she was watched enough – but this is a respectful portrait and I like that it celebrates her music. A lot of the time, in films about female artists, they only focus on the tragedy of their emotional lives and not enough about how amazing their craft was – and with this film you definitely get a sense of what an amazing singer and songwriter she was. She was much more than someone with addiction problems: she was a singular talent."

"Carver’s spare, minimalist style serves as a writer’s manual for how to get more out of less. In a sentence, or even just a phrase, Carver establishes the mood, the nature of his characters and their predicament. He gives us clues instead of paragraphs of description or lengthy dialogue. I often put people onto Carver, especially when they’ve shown me something they’ve written that needs drastic paring down. Now and then I’ve found it a good corrective when my own writing gets out of hand. My copy of this collection (thirty stories arranged chronologically by the date they were written) is well worn. Carver had something original to show the rest of us, and his early death is a real tragedy."