"I was on a panel at NYU a few years ago with Larson and enjoyed immensely listening to him talk about his craft. I’m also a Winston Churchill junkie, having recently finished Andrew Roberts’ 800-plus-page juggernaut. But this is a Churchill largely unseen in other works. It focuses on a finite time period as Britain, the last country standing after France falls, desperately tries to not just hang on until Churchill can convince the Yanks to join the fray, but to take the fight to Hitler. Larson has drawn on new material, some just recently released, to build upon the legendary status of a man who did enough during his life to justify three lives. The only historical figure who might have rivaled him in the energy and “nine lives of a cat” persona was Theodore Roosevelt. This book will reinforce many things you might have already known about the Second World War and Churchill’s place in it. But you will also learn many new things about that man and that time period that will compel you to find out more. A thoughtful, at times part funny and horrific, and scintillating read that I would recommend to all."

"The first time I saw a Bergman film—it may also have been Wild Strawberries—I was a very young man, and I couldnt believe I was seeing what I was seeing. It was as if Moses had brought down the tablets into the movie theatrer. I mean, I’d been staggered by On the Waterfront, but when I saw Bergman—he was so bold, so experimental, doing things no one had ever done before. And now I’ve seen each one of his films so many times . . . I love the fact that the story of My Dinner with André actually begins with a Bergman film. The André character has gone to see Bergman’s Autumn Sonata and has run out of the theater in tears at the moment when Ingrid Bergman, who plays a concert pianist, says, “I was always able to live in my work, but not in my life”—the very dilemma from which André felt he was suffering at the time. Remember? And then a friend finds him leaning against a wall twenty blocks away, sobbing, and the friend tells Wally about it, and that’s what leads Wally to call André, which leads to the dinner. I love so many of Bergman’s films—Persona . . ."