Harland Miller is an artist whose word-play and dexterous brushwork has won him acclaim. He reveals how past decades have informed his work:

After art school and a stint at 'Pop World', Harland is whisked off to New York and promised a show organised by the Steinitz brothers. Anxieties about accommodation ensue. Then a night spent at Jerry's café seems to crystallize his 'vision' for the future..

Producer Duncan Minshull

Acclaimed artist and writer Harland Miller reveals how an eventful past has fed into his work:

2. The late 1970s and Harland ends up in a class at school below the 'worst' group. This group is called 'Peanuts' and with guidance from his teacher Miss Stow he discovers a passion for art and an early talent for painting. There's also a side-career in 'customising' clothes, thanks to Big Kevin.

Producer Duncan Minshull

Acclaimed artist and writer Harland Miller reveals how an eventful past has fed into his work:

1. The 1970s and early art influences may have presented themselves after the graffiting of THIN LIZZY on someone's fence. At home there were father's yearnings for the culture of Venice, though the family lived in Naburn, Yorkshire. Which flooded a lot.

Producer Duncan Minshull

The poet and playwright describes how he was influenced by the comic novel "Pyramids". "When I opened the first few pages...it is no exaggeration to say my whole world changed," he recalls. As a twelve-year-old Nigerian migrant to London, Ellams found that Pratchett's hilarious fantasy world helped him in his transition to his new homeland. "If I could give myself and belong so completely and entirely to his world, which mirrored Britain, then perhaps I could belong to Britain itself."

Tony Blair's former spokesman, on how Gustave Flaubert's novel gave him a lifetime love of French culture. "It is a love that has endured. I like reading French, speaking French, listening to French. Every year of my adult life, I have spent a part of it in France, and the older I get, the more freedom I seem to have to go there, and so the more I exploit that freedom."

Zarah Hussain explains how The Arabian Nights inspired her as an artist. On discovering the book as a child, she found "the book was absolutely beautiful...There was a border of pink and blue arabesque flowers and a central image of a King wearing a gold crown and beautiful robes in conversation with a Queen similarly bedecked in robes. The floor and walls were covered in repeating geometric patterns. ...they came from a different world, a faraway place, but a place that was somehow familiar to me."

Neurosurgeon and writer Henry Marsh on how "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy began a teenage love affair with all things Russian. "I burned the plastic coating off my NHS spectacle frames to reveal the revolutionary intellectual steel inside. And bought a young Communist League badge which I could wear on my black polo neck pullover." Marsh later drove across Europe to begin the first of many stints as a volunteer surgeon in Ukraine. "My life might easily have careered off in an entirely different direction if it had not been for Tolstoy," he says.

Producer Smita Patel

Journalist and writer Afua Hirsch discusses "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys, the story of the forgotten first wife of Mr Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. Encountering Rhys's novel aged 14, Hirsch detested her account of a Creole girl growing up in 1830s Jamaica. Re-reading it much later in life, she came to believe that "it is one of the most perfect books ever written in the English language. The sparsity of Rhys's painfully meticulous sentences, which so alienated the teenage me, touches me now - a writer myself - as the work of a genius." The novel helped shape her thinking on Britishness. "Race is everywhere. Its legacy is real and traumatic. You can't opt out of it or - as so many people in contemporary Britain attempt to do - claim not to see it."

Producer Smita Patel

Paul Morley would be happy to sign up to the notion that music is a civilising force were it not for the fact that everywhere he finds it co-opted for purposes that have precious little to do with the common good. Making a journey in a lift more relaxing, easing the stress of the shopping experience and luring people towards a purchase do not seem to him to be the hallmarks of civilisation. Paul finds much to rejoice at in the way technology has made music available to so many but calls for a vigilance in the easy assumption that all music is good.

Jameela Siddiqi remembers her own relatively late discovery of the power of Indian classical music in the hands of the Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. A successful TV news producer with a stable job and a casual enthusiasm for music from Bach to the Beatles she found her world turned upside down by a concert by Khan in the late 1980s. She describes what happened to her, the musical world into which she felt inducted and the qualities of that world that she believes are entirely civilising.