In Los Angeles, as recently released documents from Kitaj's archive reveal, his life fell into a pattern, motivated, as the painting of the later years shows by a hardening of earlier obsessions: into his Jewish identity, the abiding absence of his wife, and his ongoing contempt for his detractors.
Much was made of Channel Five's early obsession with grubby programming but who the hell thought broadcasting Keith Chegwin's penis was the way forward?
He did a media course - specifically, radio - though he was already reviewing for Melody Maker, the Guardian and the Scotsman thanks to an early obsession with video games.
Those who thought they knew Carlos as a brash New Yorker may be surprised by some of his more personal recollections, including having an early obsession with swimming across the English Channel and having Fred Astaire as a childhood hero.
Born in the Boston area in 1951, Richman developed an early obsession with the Velvet Underground, to the point where he came to New York as a teen-ager and slept on the couch of the band's manager, Steve Sesnick.
The intricate computer-generated visual effects of Mr. Jackson's Weta Digital company, he explained, were born of an early obsession with what were then the sophisticated special effects Mr. Spielberg used in 1993's "Jurassic Park".
He thought that his "early obsession with Ibsen and the Greeks – continuous action, compressed plot and, of course, concern for language" was partly to blame for his failure to attract, or be attracted, by Hollywood.
Born in 1929 in the Forest of Dean, he developed an early obsession with gadgets which he nurtured while working for the Midlands Electricity Board and which found full rein when he started to make records in 1956.
So now came our first real conversation about art, which concerned what we called "the dark renaissance" – Caravaggio and Giorgione, whose extraordinary Tempest had been an early obsession for both of us.
What begins as a story of an early obsession with sharks, developed during annual Christmas visits to her uncle's home in New South Wales, becomes a deeply affecting book on a tender father-daughter relationship and, of course, that great underpinning of all memoirs, time.
