Arts Editor Millie Morris interviews bestselling author David Nicholls

When the acting legend Simon Pegg came to open a new theatre at the Bristol Students' Union, Epigram Arts seized the opportunity to discuss everything from acting to cornettos with him

Shakespeare. The Beatles. Marcel Duchamp. Virginia Woolf. Marc Rothko. Names we all know, ones which make our pseudo-intellectual ears prick up with the vague hum of that shared idea: innovation.

What makes a painting spectacular to us? Is it the composition, impeccable technique; some inexplicable mastery which bubbles below the surface, but you cannot quite identify? Or could it be the echo of what others have already said about the painting?