Bloomsbury Book Club with Lynn Barber

Britain’s greatest and most ferocious interviewer, Lynn Barber, takes to the Bloomsbury stage to discuss A Curious Career, her new memoir of her life as an interviewer with Geoff Colman.

A nosy child, Lynn Barber questioned everyone she knew about imitate details of their lives. She became the most famous celebrity interviewer with an unusual lack of the English fear of social embarrassment. She discusses the highs and lows of her early career at Penthouse where she started out interviewing foot fetishists, voyeurs, dominatrices and men who liked wearing nappies, and her eminent later career at the Telegraph, Sunday Express, Vanity Fair, Observer and Sunday Times.

Hear about the time her interview with Salvador Dali was extended from one day to four, culminating in him giving her a conical hat made of wax that he had originally designed for his wife to wear to a fancy dress ball in the 1930s; her infamous interview with the hilarious and spectacularly rude ‘ratty old rock chick’ Marianne Faithfull; and the interview with Rafael Nadal which infuriated his fans so much Barber saw her Twitter followers double so that his fans were able to abuse her online.

‘The queen bee of the celebrity interview’
Daily Mail

Lynn Barber is an award-winning British journalist. Several collections of her interviews have been anthologised. She read English Literature at Oxford, worked for Penthouse magazine for seven years, then for the Sunday Express, Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, Observer and Sunday Times. Her books include two collections of interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber, as well as two sex manuals and a study of Victorian naturalists. Her memoir, An Education, was made into an award-winning film starring Carey Mulligan and Rosamund Pike.