Colm Tóibín

You see, nobody really wrote about men in clothes, did they?

I don't think anyone did.

I'm much more interested in the sort of awkwardness of someone wearing the completely wrong shoes.

And I was initially at one of those Beatrice Ressori events and Inga Feltrinelli, who at the time was controlling the whole Feltrinelli business of publishing and bookstores, was talking about

A rule in Italy, there are so many rules.

One was that you didn't ever bring your bodyguards into the room.

Your bodyguards, the word for bodyguard in Italian is guerrilla.

And you left your guerrilla outside.

And someone very naff broke all the rules by bringing his, just to show off, he brought his guerrilla, his bodyguards into the room.

He was a minister in one of the Berlusconi governments.

And she said, how did you know that they were his guerrilla rather than maybe his friends?

And she said, oh, I looked at their shoes.

And, of course, I immediately looked at my own shoes.

And my own shoes looked very guerrilla to me.

I mean, they didn't look like Italian shoes.

So I'm sort of more interested in that idea of someone who's completely wearing just... But it's that Italian idea that they would know a foreigner who's trying to be Italian because you get one thing so wrong.

And it wouldn't just be socks.

It could just be something so, so small.

Um...

And, but I don't know, I don't know any novelist who goes on about this.