We didn't have time to look for the novelist's villa in Anacapri, but we did have lunch - a buffet of tasty antipasti - at his favourite restaurant, Gemma, in Capri Town, which is reached by a quaint, crooked alley bored through the rock, and where his photograph is proudly displayed, pasted to the ceiling of the tiny lobby along with those of many other celebrities.
He makes a crooked deal with King Lobengula of the Ndebele, then known to the Europeans as the Matabele.
In Ukraine Moscow is trying to preserve a crooked regime against the wishes of Ukrainians who want to live with dignity, because the old ways made it money.
Set on the Baltic coast, Leviathan shows a man falling foul of a crooked mayor.
It is, apparently, extraordinary, one of the stars of the show: a warped, sliding, lame, crooked house in which all the action occurs.
At Bournemouth, the carriage filled up with the semi-naked youngsters of the hashtag generation, with crooked plastic eyelashes, straining bra straps and smooth, dewy skin.
It has been here since 1867 and its inmates have included Jean Genet, Carlos the Jackal, the crooked businessman Bernard Tapie, the rogue financier Jérôme Kerviel, Manuel Noriega and – most beloved by Parisians – the swaggering gangster Jacques Mesrine.
Still, no one likes to be named and shamed as crooked and cruel.
A handsome 46-year-old with a gift for communication, Mr Peña claims to be the opposite of the crooked party men who ran the country in its pre-democratic days.
This will hit Russians far harder than the collapse of a few crooked banks or of a currency that few trusted very much anyway.
