Sachs appeal

Recently I found myself idling away an afternoon in Angelina Jolie’s Winnebago. Angelina and I were discussing books. More specifically, she was talking me through her taste in erotic fiction, which spans the centuries from the Marquis de Sade to ‘more modern stuff’.

‘Sometimes,’ she remarked, ‘you find a passage that works for you and you can go back to it over and over.’ Crikey!

Glancing around her rather anonymous trailer, parked inside a vast hangar about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, I was disappointed to see no evidence to support her claim to an interest in mucky literature. Instead, there was only one book on her sofa, there to keep her company during the longueurs that accompany the shooting of any big Hollywood film. The book was The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by the American economist Jeffrey Sachs.

I’ve met Angelina before, so I wasn’t especially surprised by this discovery. She has a reputation as a man-eater (not entirely undeserved, I’m sure; perhaps I just don’t look very appetising) and as a bit of a loon (no argument from her there), but her great passion is for philanthropy.

Angelina donates a third of her considerable income — she earns about $12 million per film — to charity; she is an ambassador for the UNHCR, on behalf of which she has lobbied Congress and frequently travels to Third-World trouble-spots; her adopted son, Maddox, comes from an orphanage in Cambodia, where earlier this year she accepted citizenship; and she recently accompanied Sachs to Davos in Switzerland where the World Economic Forum, a pro-globalisation group, has its annual shebang.