"Again, her whole catalogue is amazing. I love her music back to front. This is her hit record, as it were, not that it was a proper hit unfortunately. It's been with me for a while and I love it so much. We brought a few pieces of music to listen to while my wife was giving birth to our daughter and this was one of them. That gives an indication of how embedded in my life it is. The tone and mood it sets... She was deep into that sense of spiritual connectedness and universal love. I understand how people who aren't necessarily spiritual might see it as a foolish hippy diversion, but for me, this unlocks the potential of what music can do. At the time it was married to a political agenda, same for all these spiritual free jazz records, and I feel that it's a really unfortunate thing that people don't seem to be able to articulate that so well in the contemporary music world. This is an analysis and that's not why I love it, that's because when I put it on it's my favourite thing to be listening to. But it also stands up to analysis - there's so many reasons to love this music."

"My favorite of all Fellini’s films, it seems his most perfect and certainly his most likable and affecting. And it’s his most comical, thanks to the wonderful performances of Leopoldo Trieste and, especially, Alberto Sordi, who went on to star in over three hundred films in Italy and is rightly regarded as their greatest actor. Its story also prefigures the theme of three of his later films (La dolce vita, Toby Dammit, and Ginger and Fred), as to the corrosive effect of the new media religion of celebrity. In 1950, the inroads of paganism on Christianity still seemed only foolish when a photo¬-comic-book character almost destroys a Catholic marriage. But already by 1959, the lust for media attention had become all consuming and malignant in La dolce vita, where a journalist goes from one idiotic media event to another, including an imagined miracle in the rain. In Toby Dammit, on a nightmarish TV talk show, the church itself parades in front of the TV cameras; and in Ginger and Fred, about another ridiculous TV celebrity program, it has all become totally absurd, only momentarily relieved by a nostalgia for older performers. Half a century later, the celebrity media religion rules, and there is no end to its reign in sight."