 it might be a better way to go. work we've
    been meaning to get to anyway. When a <code>shared_ptr&lt;X&gt;</code> is
    converted from Python, the shared_ptr actually manages a reference to the
    containing Python object. When a shared_ptr&lt;X&gt; is converted back to
    Python, the library checks to see if it's one of those "Python object
    managers" and if so just returns the original Python object. So you could
    just write <code>object(p)</code> to get the Python object back. To
    exploi