I realised that if I were to write a book about Italy it was going to have to be something less circumstantial, more interpretative: a book that set out to explain what made the country tick.
Dr Yvonne Griggs, a lecturer at De Montfort University's dedicated Centre for Adaptations, thinks the bigger the interpretative gulf between book and film, the better.
The book juxtaposes descriptive and interpretative passages.
In considering various interpretative accounts of the Bible, he himself declined to chose between the judgement of the child who played with the book, the Inca emperor Atahualpa (c.1502 1533) who threw it away when it failed to speak to him, the priest who praised it as the word of God, and the critic who dissected it as a purely human invention.
Just as Byrne, post-Talking Heads, has enjoyed the kind of career that takes in chair-building, cycling books and filling live shows with interpretative dance, Clark has pursued a similarly individual path.
The most striking part of his book is his denunciation of originalism, the interpretative technique embraced by Scalia and Thomas (whose names do not appear in the text).
There is a long line of work, from War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, to Let the Right One In and American Psycho, which suggests that our increasingly interpretative theatre is drawing its strength from new versions of existing books and films.
Going from baroque to rococo, Mailer dipped into mysticism in the notorious "Marilyn," a coffee-table book that has some dubious passages and much interpretative effrontery but is certainly the only star bio that I have read with pleasure twice.
In the end, this is another worthy volume in the rarely scintillating Marx-Engels interpretative canon.
For a couple of years I hosted a show called The Book Club, a celebration of weird and tatty books I had liberated from charity shops interspersed with puppeteers, accordionists and occasional interpretative dance.
