Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice

Amazingly, this second volume of Peter O'Toole's memoirs (the first was Loitering with Intent: The Child, published in March 1995) covers only three years of the actor's life; even more amazingly, it's a wonderful read. If he hadn't been such a prodigiously gifted actor, O'Toole could have made it as a writer. His prose is discursive, freewheeling, multilayered, and fairly bursting with exuberant vitality. Loitering with Intent: The Apprentice covers O'Toole's years in the early 1950s at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he studied his craft, hobnobbed with fellow students (including Albert Finney, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship), and made rakish, footloose excursions around London. It's hard to say whether he had more fun in the living of it or the retelling, but both are a pleasure for the reader to behold.