With all due Respect

With all due respect is a big name-dropping bitch of a book written with a sharp wit and no one famous personality that has thus far featured in the author’s life, from Alfred Sant and Joseph Muscat to Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi, avoids getting the feel of its steel. There is actually a charm and a twinkling sense of humour in the ex-PN (and almost PL) MP’s fast-moving work. It is fun personified, hilarious in parts, highly entertaining and, at the most, provides excellent reading.

There are some very funny and curious stories in it, making of the book a marvellously readable account of life inside and outside the political labyrinth Pullicino Orlando visited and mustered in a career that was as abruptly cut short as it was successful at its inception. His book shows the man is nothing if not an individualist, a raconteur of style and sophistication, a writer with imagination and a sense of pace, even when he deals with personal dilemmas.

Of course autobiographies are there to be analysed and interpreted in interminable ways, as Ganado’s four-volume masterpiece still is after no less than 47 years since its publication. Likewise, there will be many who contest or contradict Pullicino Orlando’s anecdotal memoirs, just as there will be many who detect an honest sense of pride and sincerity in them. Not one autobiography has ever been declared a bible, but it takes one’s personal perspective to help find a parallel one in With all due respect.