Sean Penn: Bringing Sexy Back

Regular readers (!?) will recall that back in the autumn of 2010 I was dagging around after Sean Penn on the Dublin and New York shoots of Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be The Place.
The London Telegraph kindly sponsored the second leg of that itinerary, and with the UK release of the movie early last month my write-up of the whole adventure duly appeared in the Telegraph's Saturday magazine - a cover story, thank you very much.
There's not a huge amount of material that I left on the cutting room floor, outside of a fair bit of stuff recorded on my dime in Dublin that was/is intended for the update of my Sean Penn: His Life and Times. And I used most of the jokes too, though there is a story about Sean and a New York cop in Central Park that I would love to regale everyone with, but that it could have repercussions...

Crusaders, and "proper novels"...

Amid the broad spectrum of print reviews garnered by my Crusaders back in 2008 (the 'broad' being a huge bonus for a debut-novelist, and the 'spectrum' probably a necessary corollary of his fledgling level of attainment) I seem to remember the Telegraph, both Daily and Sunday, being kind enough to review the novel while finding a fair few things to criticise as well as praise. Fair do's; and for that very reason I was pleasd to see that in his Telegraph round-up of the best fiction of 2011 Keith Miller made a point (in the course of extolling the most recent novel by Philip Hensher) of offering a rather kind comparison:
"Like Richard T Kelly’s Crusaders of 2008, it is a proper, fat, politically and ethically engaged condition-of-England novel..."
Nothing else to say, really, other than 'Cheers Keith'...