Sligo, who had a bit part in the film Caligula financed by then Penthouse proprietor Bob Guccione, records without moralising the participants enacting scenes of masturbation and others where they bled from the anus, concluding with the information that aspirant actresses had been invited to do videotaped ‘blow jobs’ on the assistant directors. Sligo’s woman friend who supplied this information commented ‘the strange thing is that on the set it seemed logical. It was as if it was the only world that existed. Kind of like being in a concentration camp, I suppose’.

This is related to an observation by Sligo after he spent some time at Rajneesh Bhagwan’s ashram in Poona which he calls a ‘wonderful and complex web of desire, madness and collective passion’.

Sligo, who describes himself as an Anglican Catholic, did not relish Catholicism in Rome to judge from his abuse of the Vatican: (St Peters’) ‘full of old men in skirts, with limp balls and power written over every line of their faces. They copulate with it like dogs on heat, those Vatican priests in those cold dead bureaucratic men.’

So he went to Poona but when he saw the Orange People, Rajneesh’s followers, dancing frenetically at the funeral of the child of one of them, wrote: ‘The jackboot is here, even though it has covered its leather with velvet. The camps of Nazi Germany are here, and the madness of those who cast themselves away to find meaning in whatever fills them with power’. Strong words matched by the sequel ‘Over it all was the sallow, power­filled head of Rajneesh. All this he had willed from the beginning. He was feeding from this frenzy ...’ Elsewhere he describes Rajneesh as a (spiritual) cannibal.

It seems a definitive condemnation. Yet after Sligo’s return to Rome, he writes ‘I wonder what I’ll finally make of Rajneesh, Poona, truth and God’.

This ambiguity is as surprising as the lack of mention of Rajneesh’s later misfortunes or anything substantial on the reactions of a Roman friend Mercedes who accompanies Sligo in the ashram. But he does provide wonderful glimpses of life in Poona from a fat Kali temple priest to a kitchen rat described by an Indian as ‘indeed a fine rat, Sahib, and it is fat and well fed and will not trouble you. Oh no, no indeed, it is also vegetarian’.

The Roman expatriates he portrays are chic and often wealthy but, for my taste, too many ‘darlings’ are sprinkled through their conversations and Sligo, from his own description, is too inclined to smirk or snigger but can also send up himself and his coterie. He provides vivid portraits of the bohemian, Trastevere district, and Italian life, but Italians play minor roles, except in the piece devoted to the Red Brigade’s kidnapping and killing of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978. A fellow New Zealander Alan Curnow wrote a fine poem about Moro’s fifty-five days in the Red Brigade’s hands but Sligo’s piece is slight. He admits he ‘really didn’t have a clue who Aldo Moro was ... I couldn’t get a handle on him’. And he has little to say about the terrorism which had soured Italian life many months before the Red Brigade seized Moro.

Sligo is more involved with Greek politics. He pays a generous tribute to his friend Amalia Heming, widow of the discoverer of penicillin, who courageously opposed the Colonel’s regime in her native Greece. He also furnishes a chilling portrait of a Greek resistance member in Rome who had Sligo drive him to Switzerland in a trial run for a terrorist exploit. The Greek, who claimed to be a friend, callously exposed Sligo to arrest by planting explosives on him when he was to drive back across the Italian frontier. However it is not clear why Sligo did not simply dump the explosives before reaching the frontier.

He includes a swift story about a Sicilian policeman trying to extract a bribe from him (Sligo) and an amusing description of a conference on Lesbos of American lesbians who frustrated the indigenous males but won the praise from local females who thought they were better behaved than the normal promiscuous tourists. Despite his beard, Sligo was made an honorary woman (Joanna Sligo) to enable him to lecture about Sappho to the lesbians.

Another piece describes his alarm when diagnosed as a possible syphilitic. The title tale recounts a Roman dinner party which brought together a Spaniard who claims to be a descendant of the Moroccan royal family, and hence of Mahomet, and members of the Libyan royal family ousted by Colonel Gaddafi. This tale has a 1994 postscript which raises queries about details of the story and about that old teaser ‘what is truth?’

Sligo’s agile prose neatly conveys both impressions and judgements. Immediacy is its prime virtue but at times it could benefit from more background. For instance, the ‘Caligula’ piece may have benefitted from the information that the film’s director Tinto Brass began by making erotic movies with anarchistic flair but his later productions have declined to drooling voyeurism. Dining With Princes is a well-shaped, varied, and enjoyable book which deserves better internal illustrations.