Publishing magnate and former Retail Personality of the Year Naim Attallah turns masterly interviewer in this, his sixth collection of chats with the great, the good and the notso-good of British society: Sybille Bedford, Jack Jones, Ned Sherrin, R.S. Thomas, Sir Julian Critchley (most of these interviewees have titles of one kind or another), James LeesMilne, Mary Warnock, Arnold Wesker, Nicholas Mosley and so on, with a couple of difficult outsiders (Betty Friedan and Francis Stuart, for example) included for good measure. Of course, if you assemble a group of highly successful and more or less elderly luminaries in one place, you're bound to elicit a high percentage of interesting opinions, but At tallah's gentle, determined questioning draws people much further than, in many cases, you feel they would have wished to go, making this an oddly compulsive book.
By Arminta Wallace