Listen in …

… The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale: Alberto Manguel on Packing My Library and the Idiocy of Honesty in Politics.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Alberto Manguel grew up in Tel-Aviv, where his father served as the first Argentinian ambassador to Israel. At sixteen, while working at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, he was asked by the blind Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home. Manguel left Argentina for Europe before the horrors of the 'disappeared' began, and just after the events of May 1968. During the 1970s he lived a peripatetic life in France, England, Italy, and Tahiti, reviewing, translating, editing, and always reading. In the 1980s he moved to Toronto, Canada where he lived and raised his three children for almost twenty years. He became a Canadian citizen and continues to identify his nationality as first and foremost Canadian.