Ginny Dougary :: Award-winning journalist and writer

Kay Saatchi on life after Charles Saatchi

The Times, July 26, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Now the dust has settled on her divorce, Kay Saatchi has returned to her first love: modern art. With her pick of Britain’s best new talent on show in London, she tells Ginny Dougary about her future plans – and past mistakes

Lady Antonia Fraser’s life less ordinary

The Times, July 5, 2008 - Ginny Dougary In a frank interview, the famed writer talks about motherhood, Catholicism, her parents and soulmate Harold Pinter Lady Antonia Fraser adjusts her pearls, gazes out of the french windows opening out to the garden, and tells me to f*** awf. This, five minutes into our interview, comes straight after her waving a two-fingered salute at Private Eye.

The gentrification of Irvine Welsh

The Times, June 28, 2008 - Ginny Dougary As well known for his epic drug taking as his iconic tales, Irvine Welsh seems now to be embracing middle age. But as he unveils his new novel, Ginny Dougary finds life in the old punk yet The good news is that Irvine Welsh, having been obliged to give the subject some thought, does not believe that all men are potential paedophiles. What he does find interesting is that advertising and the mainstream media pander to a perceived tendency in men to respond to images of females captured on the cusp of puberty.

How my group of fixers made my flat my home

The Times, June 20, 2008 - Ginny Dougary It took time, expense and stress - but I know how not to fix up your home After my six-month odyssey to find a flat in London, following on from decades of family living in Nappy Valley in Wandsworth, I finally had a new home - but fresh challenges lay ahead.

Is John Humphrys really the pussycat of Radio 4?

The Times, June 14, 2008 - Ginny Dougary John Humphrys has a reputation as the rottweiler of Today. But interrogating the interrogator, Ginny Dougary discovers a self-critical soul who talks of life, death, fear and fatherhood John Humphrys, the so-called rottweiler of Radio 4, is in fact a pussycat. This would have been more of a surprise if I were one of the six million-odd regular listeners of the Today programme, where Humphrys has honed his interrupting skills with filibustering politicians over the past 21 years, but since I can think of nothing less soothing than starting my day with the soundtrack of argumentative discourse on governmental policy, this is not the case.

How buying agents found my dream home in London

The Times, June 13, 2008 - Ginny Dougary If your own search for a flat proves futile, it can pay to turn to the professionals This time last year I was renting an open-plan flat high up in a mustard-coloured tower next to Tate Modern and thinking of writing something AbsoLoftly Fabulous about the renting life, with its bank of 24-hour porters and fishbowl windows. After my decades in Wandsworth's Nappy Valley, it was more like the glamour of Sex and the City (without the racy bits).

Music, food of Hove: Ginny Dougary prepares some shockingly filthy numbers

The Times, May 16, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Ginny Dougary on the pleasures of writing dirty songs for the Brighton City Singers Artists, even those who are not fortunate enough to be represented by a gallery, can show their work in art fairs, restaurants and shops. Writers get to see their words in books and magazines. But what of poor composers, many of whom never have the chance to experience their pieces coming to life?

Really good snares, Mum; how Shlomo taught my son and me how to beatbox

The Times, May 14, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Shlomo, beatboxer extraordinaire, is a courteous, cleancut young man with good teeth. This I know because he bared them repeatedly while demonstrating the basic skills of a percussive vocalist - a lip-smackingly resonant “B-uh”, followed by a wide-grinned “T-uh” and the finale of an open-mouthed primal pout “K-uh” - in a masterclass conducted for the benefit of my 17-year-old son and his mother.

The Times is shortlisted for 11 British PressAwards

Ginny Dougary is nominated as Interviewer of the Year >> Read more >>

A close encounter with George Clooney

The Times, April 5, 2008 - Ginny Dougary George Clooney’s easy banter and high-brow films have made him the thinking person’s heart-throb. But what do we really know about him? Ginny Dougary has a close encounter with a most elusive superstar. George Clooney is a guys’ guy, a gays’ guy and, obviously, a ladies’ man. It’s not just the looks and the voice, the irony (a slanting sense of humour not generally shared by his compatriots), the charm, the political awareness and unphoney compassion – an American who isn’t an embarrassment to America; it’s the whole package. He must be too good, surely, to be true?

The need to share a dark secret

BBC News, Friday, 4 April 2008 - Julian Joyce Multi-millionaire poet and publisher Felix Dennis has retracted a drunken murder "confession" made to a newspaper journalist. But even if Mr Dennis's words turn out to be - as he says - "a load of hogwash", how unusual is it for genuine murderers to risk their freedom by sharing their secrets?

Did maverick magazine mogul Felix Dennis murder a man 25 years ago?

Daily Mail, 3 April 2008 'I killed him,' Dennis told interviewer Ginny Dougary from The Times at his Warwickshire mansion. 'That's all you need to know.' Read the entire story at The Daily Mail >>

Felix Dennis: ex-addict, poet - and murderer?

The Guardian, Thursday April 3 2008 - Esther Addley He has been jailed for obscenity, overcome an enthusiastic addiction to crack cocaine, and become a best-selling poet. But has he also killed a man? That was the dramatic claim made by the multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis in a newspaper interview published yesterday, a statement he has since retracted, describing it as "a load of hogwash".

The fine art of extracting an interview bombshell

The Guardian, Thursday April 3 2008 - Stephen Moss 'I once killed a man." It's not a bad headline to put over an interview - in this case the estimable Ginny Dougary's interview with Felix Dennis in the Times yesterday. Her paper obviously thought it was pretty good, too, as it slapped a photograph of the millionaire publisher on the front page with that quote underneath - a plug doubling as news.

Murder, she wrote

The Guardian, Monday April 7 2008 - Ginny Dougary When Felix Dennis 'confessed' to Ginny Dougary that he had killed a man, the interviewer faced a decision: file the sensational exclusive or fast-forward the tape. She has no doubts that she made the right choice.

Maxim publisher Felix Dennis: ‘I’ve killed a man’

The Times April 2, 2008 - Ginny Dougary The Oz trial defendant who is now a billionaire publisher with an empire that includes Maxim and The Week talks about poetry, whores, his past addiction to crack cocaine and the time he killed a man - a confession he later retracts.

Omid Djalili, seriously funny

The Times - March 22, 2008 - Ginny Dougary From terrorism to spirituality, no topic is off limits for Britain's hairiest comedian. Omid Djalili, as a British-born Iranian comedian, offers many illuminating insights into disparate strands of different cultures. Did you know, for instance, that the BBC took a view on the hirsuteness tolerance of its audience? This emerged when Omid – it surely won't be long before he becomes a one-name brand like Oprah, Delia, Madonna – was advised to move a flesh-revealing shot from the first episode of his television series to the last.

Return to Indochine

The Times - January 19 2008 - Ginny Dougary From Graham Greene to Apocalypse Now and the vanished world of French colonials, in Vietnam Ginny Dougary encounters a land of haunting resonances

I asked her whether she felt immortal. No, she answered

The Times - December 28 2007 - Ginny Dougary The last time I communicated with Benazir Bhutto was via e-mail in October after the first attempt on her life when she returned to Pakistan to fight the free elections which General Musharraf had promised.

Sex, drugs and hockey sticks

The Times - December 13, 2007 - Ginny Dougary As the new St Trinian’s film is to be released, our former Cheltenham Ladies’ College pupil recalls her days of extreme misbehaviour at the august institution Hurrah, yaroo, jolly hockey-sticks and all that . . . St Trinian’s is back, this Christmas’s anarchic antidote to Harry Potter, and one of the starlets, the fetchingly named Talulah Riley, warns us that she and her fellow celluloid schoolgirls will be doing “anything and everything — there’s drugs, there’s sex, there’s tattoos and piercings”, to which the director adds (perhaps redundantly): “It’s going to shock some people.”

Let battle commence

The Times - October 25, 2007 - Ginny Dougary How should you interview a celebrity? Our correspondent has some advice for Steve Buscemi Interview, the movie, boldly goes where no actual celebrity interview is likely to go or have gone before. It’s an intense two-hander starring Steve Buscemi (who also directed) as the duplicitious, alcoholic, pill-popping, manipulative, self-destructive, arrogant, lazy hack and Sienna Miller as the duplicitious, alcoholic, coke-snorting, etc, soap star.

Robert Redford: An American idol

The Times - November 3, 2007 - Ginny Dougary Robert Redford was the screen heart-throb of his generation, but he never quite played the Hollywood game. Back in the director’s chair, he talks about being an outsider, his looks and why he is in mourning for his country It’s a measure of Robert Redford’s enduring appeal, even at the grand age of 70, that when he says, “I’m all yours”, just for a fraction of a second, a tiny bit of you wishes it were true. In truth, despite an occasional dimpled grin – when you catch a flicker of the old Redford screen charisma that made your 13-year-old heart pound in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – and surprisingly gentle manners, he has neither the playfulness nor the hint of danger of the natural-born flirt.

Enough, says Amis, in Eagleton feud

Warring professors of cultural theory and creative writing fight themselves to a standstill over Islam

Maev Kennedy Saturday October 13, 2007 The Guardian

Martin Amis, interviewed by Ginny Dougary, Times, September 2006

'Moderate Islam is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere it is supine and inaudible.'

Tebbit hits out at Tories and names Brown as Thatcher’s natural heir

Lord Tebbit gave Mr Cameron another pre-conference jolt. He said that Baroness Thatcher knew exactly what she was doing when she visited the Prime Minister at Downing Street two weeks ago. She was aware that Mr Cameron had been at pains to distance himself from her, the former Conservative chairman added. The devastating intervention from Lord Tebbit came in an interview with Ginny Dougary in The Times Magazine, to be published on Saturday. He drew a wounding comparison between Mr Brown, on whom he lavished praise, and Mr Cameron, whom he criticised for his lack of experience and his stand on grammar schools. “I think we lack somebody of the standing of Margaret,” he said when asked to name the Conservatives’ biggest asset.

The torchbearer

The Times - September 29, 2007 - Ginny Dougary Norman Tebbit discusses Cameron, loss and multiculturalism Lord Tebbit brought up the white rabbit as we scuttled down corridor after dimly lit corridor in the gentlemen’s club late afternoon hush of the House of Lords. It is the women we pass – of a certain age, two of them in wheelchairs – who greeted him with tremendous warmth. Later, over tea – as formal and English, with the possibility of triangular cucumber sandwiches and oozy cakes, as tea at the Savoy – he tells me that one of the smiling Baronesses had been a real toughie, an ultimate Tebbitian compliment, as the former head of intelligence in one of the trickier countries in the African continent. He is quite the man for a flourish, verbal and otherwise, opening the door for a younger Baroness with a courtly hand gesture; Baroness Amos returns the favour with a rather cool look.

Yes, we are bovvered

The Times - September 25, 2007 - Ginny Dougary Why do so many teenage girls play up to the slutty, binge-drinking image promoted by lads’ mags? Whatever happened to hard-won feminism? It was a column last year by Rosie Boycott, the writer and broadcaster, that first sounded an alarm bell. She was reeling from having read Nuts, one of the younger lads mags (read by schoolboys as well as young adult males), in which every woman who had achieved something in her own right – other than possessing a great pair of boobs - was routinely dismissed as a boot-faced minger or dyke. Dame Ellen MacArthur, who had just achieved another nautical first, came in for a particular drubbing: “a miserable, sobbing, whining bitch in a boat. . . basically a frigid dyke-looking, yachting c***”.

Rock’s Stepford wife

The Times - August 21, 2007 - Ginny Dougary She married two Sixties legends and inspired three of the era’s greatest love songs. But Pattie Boyd’s life in the most famous love triangle in rock was far from glamorous

Paean of praise to the ginger-ninjas

The Times - June 29 2007 - Ginny Dougary When Titian-haired Ginny Dougary wrote a choral piece celebrating redheads, it brought home to her how much ‘gingerism’ there is in England Click here to listen to Ginger Chorale by Ginny Dougary and MJ Paranzino, performed at the Royal Festival Hall, June 2007 Photo courtesy Red and Proud

Al Gore - he’s hot

The Times - July 6 2007 - Ginny Dougary Once derided as a wooden politician, Al Gore is the man of the moment. On the eve of his series of ‘save the planet’ Live Earth rock concerts, Ginny Dougary finds him warm, witty, passionate and attractive Photo: Brett Wilson The Goracle – also known in Washington these days as “Al Gore: rock star” – clears his throat and starts singing the lines from a Bob Dylan song quietly and unselfconsciously: “ ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’ . . . it’s a lovely lyric. He’s written so many great ones . . . like ‘He not busy being born is busy dying’.” The former Vice-President of the United States may be joining the likes of Madonna and the Pussy-cat Dolls on stage at Wembley’s Live Earth concert tomorrow but his vocalising – as far as I know – will be restricted to challenging each and every member of the audience to make a pledge right now to do his or her bit to save the planet.

Culture vulture

The Times - May 12 2007 - Ginny Dougary Once famous for his barbed dissection of tacky TV, Clive James all the while was living a life of the mind. Our correspondent meets a modern polymath as he unveils his 40-year cultural odyssey on Times Online Photo: Mark Harrison Australians, in my experience, however deeply transplanted, still crave the cerulean skies and bright light of their birthplace which is why it is unexpected to find Clive James, on the sunniest of English spring mornings, in a curtain-drawn lair of such impenetrable gloom that the atmosphere seems to fizz with electricity from all the wattage. Or, perhaps, that's just the effect of his personality.