FYAHMIX

I wouldn't trust them to do it right.""And um ..." a huge explosion of the helpless giggles, "I think I'm a pretty good actor." Then, as if by way of explanation, "I'm trying to have more confidence in myself." But surely everyone knows she's a good actress "No, I don't think they do. 'Cos I don't think I've had the opportunities to show that yet Except for Boys Don't Cry. And this new film I've just done, Three Needles, where I play a novice in South Africa, trying to be a true missionary, working with all these people who have Aids. I'm really excited about that." (Does it surprise you to learn that one of her favourite Woody Allen movies is Alice, "superficial uptown girl drinks a potion and ends up working in Calcutta with Mother Teresa." Yeah, that's such an interesting story.)Sevigny can't decide if she has a right to a life of privilege and ease; and even for an onlooker, it's hard to know which side to root for You don't really want her to end up in Calcutta Or chained to a boorish guru. But nor is the idea of her morphing into a Hollywood siren particularly appealing.

I'm sure she could make it if she tried hard enough - there are lots of funny-looking golden girls (Zellweger herself, when you think about it, isn't a conventional cutie-pie) and Sevigny is more than talented enough to skip between genres.

09/11 - 10/11 Bag Foo Fighters Tickets performing in Maverik Center, Nationwide Arena. Foo Fighters is performing in Salt Lake City, Columbus and Oakland. Foo Fighters tickets

07/11 Bag R. Kelly Tickets staging in Bridgestone Arena, Fox Theatre. R. Kelly is staging in Nashville, Detroit and Richmond. R. Kelly tickets

07/11 - 08/11 Land Toby Keith Tickets performing in Marcus Amphitheater, Meadowbrook U.S. Cellular Pavilion. Toby Keith is performing in Milwaukee, Gilford and Saint Paul. Toby Keith tickets

But it would be so spooky, to see her in a rom-com, flirting with Matthew McConaughey, say.What you really want for Sevigny is for her to find something in between Extraordinary-ordinary actresses are thin on the ground. Reese Witherspoon seems to have been spirited away into the plastic-fantastic realm of fame, while Sarah Polley has all but disappeared from view. Samantha Morton is probably one of the few mature youngsters still fighting her corner. We need Chloe.The interview over Sevigny dashes off to "the little girl's room", then emerges, with a frown. "It just keeps flushing - that's such a waste of water." Another thought occurs, and she rushes over to switch off the air conditioning ("I mean we should, if no one's in the room ...") She finds a maid, tells her about the toilet, walks with me to the hotel entrance, kisses me goodbye and says, "Maybe we can meet up [pause] when I'm in London." Then, murmuring, "I am going to be sooo late," she dashes off in the direction of home.Harmony Korine once said of Sevigny that she was a "good girl".

At the time, as a summing up, it sounded a little patronising, dismissive even. I think I'm beginning to understand what he meant.'Party Monster' is released on 26 September. Earlier this summer, after he had finished Pompeii, Robert Harris returned to the Bay of Naples and the settings for his first - though possibly not last - fictional excursion into the ancient world. At Cumae, he pondered the longest extant stretch of the Aqua Augusta: the astonishing Roman aqueduct that served the towns around the Bay, and also makes the plot of Pompeii flow The novelist of imploding empires felt "tears in my eyes". He was moved - as writers have been for centuries - by the sight of "futility and abandonment" overtaking such toil and skill: "Buses and lorries run underneath; no one pays it any attention at all." Earlier this summer, after he had finished Pompeii, Robert Harris returned to the Bay of Naples and the settings for his first - though possibly not last - fictional excursion into the ancient world. At some point - who knows when that will be? - it will happen to America, even." At the climax of a thriller that (for once) no spoiler can ruin, the scholar-admiral Pliny the Elder gazes at the scorching waves of ash and gas ripping down Vesuvius and sees in nature's fires "the futility of human pretension".Sitting in the sun-strafed garden of a West Berkshire gastro-pub, the decline and fall of empires might seem an abstract theme History, however, has a habit of turning up unbeckoned. Spotting the waitress's Polish accent, Harris finds out that she's a philosophy graduate with decided views about the economic wreckage left by the collapse of Stalin's Cold War imperium.It was this tormented aftermath that, five years ago, supplied a New Russian backdrop to Harris's third novel, Archangel.

After Fatherland (with its cunning variations on the old premise of a victorious Hitler), and Enigma (which sprinkled stardust over the code-breakers of Bletchley Park), that novel rounded off a trilogy of ingenious and eloquent mid-century thrillers. Harris also remains the - happily inactive - biographer of John Le Carr?"the key writer of a phase of world history, the Cold War", with a licence to publish after the subject's death.Together, previous novels and non-fiction have exorcised the "obsessions" of a war-shadowed Midlands youth: "I had written out what I felt about 20th-century politics." The novels' success tugged Harris out of the milieu of the well-connected commentator, and into the select band of blockbuster authors who credit readers with brains and curiosity. Harris (who enjoys his top-of-the-range motors) had accelerated from 6,000 - the initial print-run of Fatherland - to sales of 6 million in under a decade. At the same time, friends and contacts in New Labour seized control first of their party, then their country.Here was a mere scribe - son of a printer, Nottingham-bred, Cambridge-educated, Newsnight- and Fleet Street-trained - who had soared close to the sun (or rather, the Sunday Times, where he wrote a prescient political column). Cue a nasty outbreak of green-tinged damnation-with-faint-praise.Hacks waxed venomously lyrical about Harris's canal-side Victorian vicarage, with brother-in-law Nick Hornby popping in for a cup of sugar from the cottage next door while chum Peter Mandelson lounged on the sofa and worked the phone. Boris Johnson even dubbed Harris "New Labour's answer to Jeffrey Archer", before that tag might land you in the libel courts. Pompeii features a self-made tycoon called Ampliatus, who feeds a slave to man-eating eels just for kicks.