"When I first saw this at university, in 1960, I found it boring. Yet something made me watch it a second time that same term, and I fell under the spell of Antonioni’s mesmeric camera movements, his grasp of love and its heartaches, and above all the impassioned beauty of Monica Vitti. The film looks as freshly minted as if it had just been released."

"A professor at Northwestern University had this book on our list of required reading for an Industrial Engineering class I took my junior year of college. It was a seemingly odd choice, but at the end of the day, the takeaway was a self-empowerment and motivational bent that I apply to decision making in my life to this very day. It’s an invaluable quick read."

"This book is the best insight into unknowable Russia, a country I’ve been fascinated by since I studied its language and literature at school and university. It’s the pretend biography of a real-life Russian contrarian, poet, politician, anti hero and punk, Edward Limonov, whose life has shadowed Putin’s and who is now one of Putin’s biggest apologists. It’s a totally brilliant, badass book."