Fernando Sabino, 100 years old: reminiscences of a Brazilian writer in London'.

"Shouldn't we order again?" he suggested shyly. After several apologies, the drink was finally served."Sometimes I begin to suspect that English excessive politeness is playing tricks on me," he confessed in one of his chronicles from the anthology Open Book (2001), which he himself called "a posthumous life work." Fernando Tavares Sabino, who was to celebrate his centenary on October 12, lived in London from 1964 to 1966. He was invited by João Goulart's government foreign minister, João Ogusto de Araújo Castro, to take up the post of cultural attaché at the Brazilian embassy in the British capital."Eighteen years later, I often joked to him that he should not forget me when he became Chancellor...," the writer recounts in''Chronicle of London', which is included in the book Chessboard (1988), a kind of autobiographical sketch. "And he has not forgotten me."Interestingly, another great Brazilian writer, Rubem Braga, Sabino's partner in Sabiá's publishing venture, also worked abroad.