Booker prize-winner DBC Pierre was at a low point. Contemplating suicide. Then he discovered the Romantic classics. “I realised my feelings were being set to music. I froze, and heard every detail of my turmoil being painted in symphony. The music acknowledged tumult, contradiction, confusion, fear and the ultimate conquest of the dark plains of psyche and soul. It announced that misery was life’s default, and beckoned me to stay close to it, proposing conflict to be a sweet and human thing, a many-textured set of riddles that needed recourse to nothing but a working nervous system. The Romantics had found me. I took them full in the vein.”