“... meant the Hollywood films of the Weimar émigré Douglas Sirk; for Penman, it was Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and disco. ‘Fassbinder,’ he writes, ‘as someone who was both hedonistic and thoughtful, radical and radically in love with popular forms, seemed like some kind of post-punk ideal.’Penman aimed, he says, to ‘retain traces of the book ...”

“... What follows are a series of closely focused scenes with lots of voiceover. Wilder, then called Billie, is in a relationship with a woman called Hella. They are on holiday in Switzerland when they hear the news that Adolf Hitler has been made chancellor:EXT. MOUNTAIN. DAYA ski run in Davos, Switzerland. ...”

“... weren’t the Founding Fathers. They were Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular ...”

“... on children’s television: he started out as a producer on Why Don’t You?, the BBC’s summer holiday activities and crafts programme, then wrote two science-fiction serials for children’s slots, Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993). These apparently and properly divergent interests fuse, brilliantly, at the centre of Davies’s Doctor Who, for ...”