Several years back, around the time my first book was published, I received an invitation via my Italian publisher to speak at a large cultural festival in Rimini. Not knowing much about the Italian literary or cultural world, I had little sense of what the festival was – only that it was large and would be a “very interesting” event. I tended then to take whatever opportunities came along to promote the book, and it seemed hard to object to a couple of days on the Adriatic coast, in Fellini’s hometown. I said yes.

I was visiting Italy fairly often at the time, and whenever the Rimini event came up with my Italian publishers it was described in slightly veiled terms as something very Italian, Catholic, conservative and something I, with my interest in power, would find “very interesting”. Aware I knew little about Italian politics, and slightly uneasy I might be drifting into some kind of quasi-fascist milieu, I did some cursory googling. I found that, though organised by a conservative Catholic organisation, the festival seemed like a fairly broad church, intellectually and politically. Over the years, everyone from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to Mother Teresa of Calcutta had taken part. Why, even Noam Chomsky himself had spoken there a few years previously. How bad could it be, I thought, in my pre-Epstein-revelations innocence, if Noam Chomsky had chosen to associate himself with it? And so I went and gave my little talk about technology and the future, met some interesting people and learned things I didn’t know about Italy, and came home.

The day after I returned, I mentioned the trip to an Italian acquaintance, who reacted with genuine alarm. It was strange, he said, that I had aligned myself with such ideological company. The people behind it were hardly less objectionable than Opus Dei, and in their way just as enmeshed........

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