Would British Punk ever have existed if the Sex Pistols’ transgressions hadn’t encountered Vivienne Westwood’s pencil? Would Stallone have invented the mythical Rocky if Chuck Wepner, a hopeless white boxer, hadn’t held out for 15 rounds under the fury of Muhammad Alì? Would Bill Gates have built his informatics empire without Gary Kildall’s genius and passion for flying? Would Jeff Koons have ever become one of today’s most controversial artists if he hadn’t met Cicciolina and her cherry lips? These and many others are the encounters Zito writes about, detailed distillates from the successful Radio 24 series that explores the life of famous people in the worlds of entertainment, literature, sport, fashion, politics and art, seeking those tangles of destiny without which nothing would have been possible or would have been very different. And along with the stories of “destiny’s couples” the cities, the eras and the atmospheres more or less far off in time and space come to life again. From the Cuban revolution where the Che myth was born to the tightrope walker, Petit’s dizzying New York; from Franco and Ciccio’s postwar Palermo to the Seventies London of David Bowie, Biba, Sid Vicious. Like billiard balls, the protagonists of these stories slide towards each other, touch and take off on a tangent, returning if they meet an obstacle, or going straight ahead on their trajectory. And the reader is involved in this game of who meets whom and whose life changes.