Voices from the recent past

Interviews, like watercolours, are very hard to get right, and yet look how steadily their art has become degraded and under-appreciated. Each and every Shumble, Whelper and Pigge in our media fancies that an interview can be tossed off: you need only switch on the microphone and let the person speak. Radio is the worst culprit. John Fowles was on a US book tour when the announcer muddled his notes and introduced him as ‘the singing nun of Milwaukee’.

Inevitably hitting the wrong note, too many interviewers rely on the rickety scaffolding of the unpublished novelist, seizing on, say, their subject’s white socks, and then truffling up some unpalatable morsel from their past with which to spring an ambush — resulting in a locked jaw that no road drill could unclamp. The best interrogators can be counted on one hand. My own list would include John Freeman, Oriana Fallaci, Martyn Harris, Janet Malcolm and Lynn Barber. To which I now add the Palestinian publisher and author, Naim Attallah.

I admit I had not come across Attallah’s interviews in the Oldie, the magazine he supported from its launch in 1992 and to which, at the suggestion of its founding editor Richard Ingrams, he contributed these 49 ‘in depth’ encounters with ‘a famous oldie’. Arranged alphabetically, with two further additions, the 41 men and ten women encompass a sizeable range of knowledge, achievement and character. The cumulative effect of reading their considered answers to Attallah’s questions, brilliantly prepared and researched by Jenny Erdal, is not merely addictive and refreshing, but also instructive.

‘How nice to be asked some intelligent questions for a change,’ purrs Julian Critchley, ‘instead of being interrogated by some silly girl who doesn’t know her arse from her elbow.’ Bill Deedes, whose interview kicked off the series, is ‘astonished at what you get out of people if you give yourself the time to talk to them for more than ten minutes’.