By that warped logic, not having the STD discussion implies a sense of trust – and therefore greater intimacy.Unfortunately, the illusion of romance ends when the painful urination begins. “I think that if a man carries condoms in his wallet here, women think: ‘Right, this is obviously a one-night stand, and he does this a lot,’” says one twentysomething film producer who met her latest fling at The Wellington pub in London. Otherwise, I tend to meet people at friends’ parties, so it’s not as if I’m picking up women in a random bar.”British men also seem to associate condoms with illicit affairs, more suitable to a one-night stand than a proper girlfriend. I go to member’s clubs like Soho House, where you know two things about the people you meet: that the membership committee has approved them, so they most likely work in a field like arts or the media, and they can afford to spend £600 a year to belong.

“Darling, if you move in the right sort of circles, that type of thing just doesn’t happen,” he said.In lieu of latex, he relies on a system of “social vetting” to weed out potential dangers “I don’t go out to bars. Though he is successful and – again – well-educated, I found his answers alarming. And HIV hasn’t gone away: the Health Protection Agency estimates that there are just under 50,000 people living with the virus in the UK, a third of whom have not been diagnosed.To get a glimpse inside the British male’s head-in-the-sand attitude, I met my dashing 39-year-old journalist friend Michael for cocktails at Soho House. At this stage in the proceedings – the subject four years dead, the world about which he wrote no more than a gently receding memory – there are two standard views of Anthony Dymoke Powell (1905-2000), each of them sharply opposed to the other. It was a difficult thing for white people to write about in an honest way.” She wanted to tackle it from the viewpoint of someone at the epicentre, who has “a lot to answer for but is also speaking in self-defence”.Too intelligent to play the ringlet-tossing Southern belle, Manon is caught in a menage with her brutish husband and the mulatto slave who bears his children Some readers find her repellent. “I’ve got a Gothic streak,” she says thoughtfully, “but then, so does Hawthorne. Meanwhile Matthew Rhys is riveting as his deceptive bastard-son Edmund: ice-cool yet seething underneath.

The ebullient, free-spirited Nicola learns to his cost that allowing loved ones unlimited freedom can do more harm than good; Matteo’s unfathomable sorrow, while never explained, is redolent of the malaise eating away at the soul of his country. When Matteo and Giulia first meet there is the sort of electric charge one assumes to be attraction: what we later realise is that it is recognition, between people who are ready to throw away all they hold dear, without really understanding why.While Nicola gives the film its spirit, Matteo is its tragic heart. Around them characters come and go, shaping their history: Giulia, Giorgia, their parents and their sister Francesca, a magistrate who gets caught up in the Falcone assassination; and a photographer, Mirella (Maya Sansa), whose presence reaffirms the equilibrium of the brothers’ relationship.Comparison has already been made with The Godfather (towards the end the characters, perhaps too knowingly, even swap Brando impersonations); while Italian cinema has itself produced such personal/social sagas, not least Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, and Bertolucci’s Novocento. According to data from Brook, the rates of chlamydia identified at UK GUM (genito-urinary medicine) clinics increased 139 per cent between 1996 and 2002 – one in 11 sexually active young women is now believed to be infected – with gonorrhoea up 106 per cent over the same period. I gently pointed out that many diseases, such as chlamydia, the most common and easily spread, can be asymptomatic for months or years.Not only was he completely unaware of the symptoms of chlamydia and gonorrhoea, but I also got the feeling that he thought they were some type of tropical storm. “Why would I do that? I’ve never had anything wrong with me in my life,” he said, fumbling for a cigarette.