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BACK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lynn Barber established herself as our finest exponent of the celebrity interview. When the Independent On Sunday began, her pieces – compellingly limpid, shrewd, unsentimental, first-person accounts that asked the killer questions that didn’t usually get asked – were reason enough to buy the paper.

She published two collections of her classic head-to-heads with the likes of Jimmy Savile, Earl Spencer and Melvyn Bragg, who was apparently traumatised by the experience.

The golden age of interviewing over which she presided is in decline now, thanks to the press officers and the relentless need to plug product.

But Barber, now in her early 70s, continues to interview for The Sunday Times, the doyenne of a dying genre.

In this latest volume she collects a few more of her pieces, and tops and tails them with reflections on interviewing best practise and various autobiographical snippets.

She includes a coda to the true story of Simon, the conman she nearly married, which became the subject of the film An Education, based on her coming of age memoir of the same name.

Barber always speaks as she finds and we must do the same. I found the book a bit of a disappointing miscellany.

The bits about interviewing have a reheated air and are likely to be of limited interest to lay readers.

By her own admission, her life has been fairly safe and low-risk, and the key dramas have already been covered elsewhere.

Personally, I would rather have read lots more of those deftly scripted encounters that were good enough to sell a newspaper.

Dan Brotzel