Although almost all my notes remained legible despite the fire and water in my borrowed apartment, I had to get a new copy of Evola’s Riding the Tiger, a book I’d brought with me to read while waiting for interviews to materialize. Evola, Baron Julius. Artillery officer, avant-garde painter, magician. Died in Rome, 1974. His books were discovered in the Lenin Library in Moscow by Jamal and a few other Soviet dissidents shortly after the Cuban missile crisis. The librarians who had let Evola’s books onto the open shelves could never have looked inside their covers and had not realized how dangerous they were. In Italy in the 1970s, it is said, you got into more trouble if the police found Evola’s books during a search of your apartment than if they found plastic explosives.
– Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004), p. 5