When the British Independent on Sunday was launched a decade ago, Lynn Barber's extended interviews with celebrities, politicians and movers and shakers were the flagship pieces in the IoS's magazine. She's since moved to the Observer, but the interviews - which earned her the monikers of Barber the Butcher and Demon Barber - are as sharp as ever. This is her second collection of interviews, and among those who submit to her scissors are Gerry Adams, Julie Burchill, Gilbert and George, Fergie's da, Jarvis Cocker, Damien Hirst, Richard E.Grant, Anthony Hopkins, Calvin Klein and the late Alan Clark. There are only four women: Barber says herself she prefers interviewing the male sex - her first collection of interviews was called Mostly Men. The more starry or outrageous the subject, the happier she is. "Nice" people get short shrift. Of Felicity Kendal she writes: "I was secretly gratified to notice her hands looked older than mine, hideous knotted bony claws with crimson talons." That remark indicates the mischief that marks Barber out as an interviewer, and which makes so much of her sharply-observed work fairly crow with glee. Only she could have written about Gerry Adams's childhood and managed to bring in a reference to that gloriously subversive clan The Addams Family.
