Lynn Barber: Interviewers need to be a cut above

LYNN Barber has just published a memoir, A Curious Career, about her days as Fleet Street’s greatest interviewer. Nobody can get to the nub of a celebrity like "the demon Barber".

She has all the necessary attributes. She’s competitive, admitting that what drives her is a thirst to throw out the questions others are too embarrassed to ask, a fearlessness that was honed at her first press job with Penthouse magazine where she used to interview fetishists about their sexual peccadilloes (“You could say I started at the bottom”).

She once reduced the English presenter Chris Evans to tears, defending her right to be combative in interview because, she argues, blunt questions serve the interviewee well, as they force the person to come back strongly. And she asks intelligent questions: at the end of a legendary, four-day interview with Salvador Dalí, the surrealist painter begged her to go on: “More! More!” She has a novelist’s eye for detail, and the ability to capture a person with a telling observation, like the way Richard Harris used to grab his groin every time he spoke about his sex life, or how Luciano Pavarotti was effortlessly charming with her yet unnecessarily rude to her newspaper’s photographer.