It’s not all good manners

Lynn Barber’s interviews are one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Observer: on any Sunday when a piece of hers appears, it’s always the first thing to turn to, even — or make that especially — when she’s profiling someone unsympathetic. Not for nothing has she earned the nickname the Demon Barber.

On John Prescott, for example: ‘You wouldn’t want to invite Prezza to dinner, not because he might eat peas off his knife, but because he’d bore the other guests to death.’ What makes Barber such an unfailingly enjoyable read is that she makes her own judgments about people, which means she often likes monsters or disdains saints. Her style is brisk to the point of breathless and so informal (a typical sentence is ‘Crikey.’) that the reader is flattered into feeling as if they were an intimate of hers, catching up on private gossip. The fact that she tends to highlight her own failings adds to the fun.

This style characterises her memoir, An Education. There is swanking: ‘I know it’s appallingly naff to boast about awards, but I adore them’; undergraduate promiscuity: ‘I probably slept with about 50 men in my second year’; as well as disloyalty, impatience, indiscretion. She relishes her own perversity: ‘I have always found it difficult to hate the rich, as good leftie journalists are meant to do, because they’ve always been so nice to me’. She will confound feminists by refusing to condemn soft porn (her first journalistic job was on Penthouse), on the grounds that old men and young boys need ‘something to wank over’. All of which makes An Education an absolutely marvellous read. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s too short.