A pretty comprehensive history of Italy. To give some insight into m motivation for reading it, my wife is Italian, so I really wanted to know more about the country. And this book pretty much achieved this goal.I particularly liked the early chapters that discuss the geographical disadvantages...
I mean you want it to be nice for them, you know, not breathing all over them or lying on your back snoring like something that’s been washed up on a beach. You can’t really relax, just let one go like you might in your own bed; on top of which I’d taken my shirt off, it always makes me sweat wea...
The first shoot of the Viagra documentary was supposed to start in a month; we had no final script. I waited a day, then another and sent him a jolly e-mail. (I loathed its tone of phony camaraderie.) His answer came almost immediately. He had been offered a two-hour documentary on Nelson Mandela...
I was sitting in a café at the foot of my street, killing time before bed. Over the past few weeks I’d been organizing a book of essays on Arthur Rimbaud, but it was slow going. Several key contributors who had promised me papers had proven unreliable. One dropped out entirely, claiming he no lon...
The other night I did a search on my eight-year-old computer and discovered that there were over 250 different documents where I mentioned the Beatles by name. Book reviews, a screenplay (unproduced), a novel, a magazine article on Tolstoy, diaries, letters, even a wine review. They certainly got...
You didn’t know I had a sister? Yes, Sally, a half-sister really. She was fifteen years older than me, my mother’s daughter from a turbulent first marriage. I saw her now and again when I was growing up, but probably the difference in our ages, a generation, and the fact that she never lived with...