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Inevitably hitting the wrong note, too many interviewers rely on the rickety scaffolding of the unpublished novelist, seizing on, say, their subject’s white socks, and then truffling up some unpalatable morsel from their past with which to spring an ambush —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.