Met Commissioner Cressida Dick on the challenges facing the police in London – and the problem with TV crime dramas. There is good news for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service on the morning of our interview, and there is bad news. The highest-ranking police officer in the land – and the first woman …
Clear blue skies, the low winter sun lighting up the sea, even the unusually balmy weather seeming to conspire to give the occasion an extra blessing; it was a wonderful day. This was my second wedding, in December, with almost 40 years between the two. At the first, barely out of our teens, the tousled-haired …
Jenny Agutter walks across the floor of an old, atmospheric house, let out for location work – all artful peeling walls – in South-East London, with the bearing of a dancer that she once trained to be long ago when she was sent to board, at the age of eight, at Elmhurst Ballet School. She is sixty-five and …
Anne Robinson is hosting a special edition of Weakest Link for Children in Need – but is she still the Queen of Mean? As is to be expected from a broadcaster worth an estimated £50 million, Anne Robinson lives in a smart part of central London in an attractive and substantial Georgian house. The beginning …
What a peculiar, slightly seedy, febrile family the du Mauriers seem to have been. We may not be startled by its members’ attitude to morality if you look at the raw ingredients. Descended from French aristocrats (although this was later discovered by Daphne, the subject of the book, to have been a background upgrade, faked …
An interview with the all-round good egg and nation’s darling? What could possibly go wrong … until the nightmare of ‘copy control’ started. After 35 years as a journalist, I experienced two firsts last week. One was that I asked for my byline to be removed from an interview I had written, which was a direct …
Morgan’s motivation was to look at the legacy of murder and the history of murder; to explore what murderers are like and what it takes to be one. “The whole piece is about acts of violence and how acts of violence can shatter you, and I wanted to look at a true psychotic character.” Morgan …
“Hello-ohhh,” exhales a breathy voice. “How LOVELY to be talking to you, Ginny.” There’s something spookily captivating about that particular, familiar sound – the depth, the tone, the articulation, the capital-letter emphasis, the old-fashioned pronunciation (“theatah” for theatre). It belongs to La Lumley and we are speaking ahead of the announcement of her being granted …
We may be accustomed to Manhattan career girls exchanging their high heels for trainers when they leave the office, but Cynthia Nixon sheds her red stilletos at the end of our interview and opens her bag to reveal… no, not something practical to slip into but a pair of even more perilous designer shoes – …
Beryl Bainbridge lied as a child and it was a habit that stuck. Exasperated by the writer’s constant verbal fudging over her shenanigans with married men, one friend wrote to her: ‘Oh, you never tell the truth. You’re dreadfully dishonest’ — six years went by before the friendship was healed. Bainbridge’s biographer, Brendan King, was …