Diary – 19 November 2005

I’d never have guessed that there was a connection between Joan Collins and the novelist Anthony Powell, the centenary of whose birth is being commemorated with an exhibition at the Wallace Collection. But there is, as I discovered quite by chance 20 years ago when I went to interview Powell to mark his 80th birthday. He and his wife Lady Violet had invited me for lunch before the interview; indeed he had himself prepared one of his famous curries and he greeted me at the door wearing a cook’s apron. At one point during lunch he asked me who had been my last interviewee. My heart sank. Would he feel demeaned when he heard my answer? Would he think that he was in the wrong company? Should I name my last interviewee but one, Isaiah Berlin? I plucked up my courage. ‘Joan Collins,’ I murmured. ‘Perhaps you’ve heard of her?’ (Joan at that time was mainly identified with the American soap opera Dynasty; she had not yet become a national institution.)