Waterstones on Piccadilly is supposedly Europe’s biggest bookshop. I’m traipsing around it looking for Europe’s most fashionable political writer. But where is Giuliano da Empoli, author of The Hour of the Predator? He is meant to be here.

The shop is gargantuan. It has six floors, eight miles of bookshelves, and – today – one increasingly frantic Irish journalist. I just cannot locate Da Empoli, whose works on the angst of our times are quoted by leaders from his friend the French president Emmanuel Macron to Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen.

I was told I’d find him in the cafe at our allotted hour, but all I see are couples cooing over plates of cake. I struggle to download a picture of him on Google Images to compare directly with the faces of the happy cake-munchers.

But this is the West End of London: mobile phone coverage often doesn’t exist.

I bound up flights of stairs to reach the top-floor restaurant. No sign of him there either. A staff member notices my panic and I explain my quest: “Apart from our main cafe below, we have another one on the lower ground floor. Have you tried there?”

I haven’t tried it yet because I didn’t even know that floor existed – this shop is like a sprawling city-state.

As I hurtle back down the stairs, a single, wonderful bar of mobile coverage pops up on my phone, followed by a download of the author’s face. The panic ends. I find him waiting serenely in a corner of the lower ground floor cafe where I have specifically been told I will meet him; it soon dawns that I haven’t read the email properly.

The 52-year-old looks as you might expect for an in-vogue Italian-Swiss intellectual who writes in French: all literary-academic casual chic with days of stubble.

Meanwhile, I am red-faced and puffed out as I try to feign insoucianc