"A book that imprinted me at a young age more than almost any other. (Patti Smith’s lifelong fixation has nearly ruined him for me but I’ll get over it.) He uses a terse footnote on page one — as a 13-year-old reader, startling and altering my idea of the possibilities of Literature itself – that in its power illumines David Foster Wallace’s Footnote Forest as moronic/masturbatory."

"It just really changed my life. I was quite young when I saw it, about 14, but it must have gone in – I ended up wearing the very same jacket as David Hemmings in the film. It's a unique document about what a carve-up it was, the Crimean War. It was a very unpopular film when it came out. I actually flew back from LA to see it in a cinema once, it was shown so rarely."

"The narrative around contemporary Africa’s cosmopolitan cities, exciting young people, vibrant artists, and rapidly evolving promise is, happily, becoming increasingly familiar to people around the globe. In this amazing book, David Adjaye looks at architectural space across the continent, dividing it into regions defined by climates and cultures, rather than artificially-derived national boundaries. Here the Maghreb, the desert, the Sahel, the forest, the Savanna and grasslands, and the mountains and high fields, are the defining features of how different architectures throughout Africa can be witnessed."