Alex Bilmes

Sachs appeal

Angelina Jolie tells Alex Bilmes about her enthusiasm for the hottest economist on the block

issue 14 May 2005

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.

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