Interviews can be a very useful window into the soul – depending on the skill of the interviewer and how experienced/defensive is the interviewee. Michael Parkinson was Britain's most famous television interviewer – he died last week. He was a rather “soft” interviewer, very much letting his guests perform - in complete contrast to the likes of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, famous for her tough, no-holds-barred questioning of prominent figures such as Henry Kissinger and Komenei which you can read in her Interviews with History (1976)
Polly Toynbee is a progressive journalist and a stalwart of The Guardian newspaper which is seen as liberal but which revealed its true colours when it mounted a vicious campaign from 2016-2020 against Jeremy Corbyn. Faute de mieux, it is my regular daily reading but it thoroughly deserved the critical appraisal it got a couple of years ago with Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021). Toynbee, typically, comes from an illustrious family – her grandfather was the famous historian Arnold Toynbee and she has just produced a revealing memoir “An Uneasy Inheritance – my family and other radicals”.
She was the guest on James O'Brien's “Full Disclosure” podcast recently – one of my favourites by virtue of the excellence of his conversational style. Like Fallaci, he does his homework, choosing his subjects simply because he finds them interesting. And the interview is conducted in a relaxed way but with O'Brien picking up throwaway comments and using them skilfully. I didn't know, for example, about Toynbee's spells in low-paid work – very much like Barbara Ehrenreich who, very sadly, died just a year ago and is particularly famous for her “Nickel and Dimed” book. Toynbee – ever the Labour stalwart – produced, with David Walker in 2017, the book Dismembered – how the attack on the state threatens us all which inspired my Search for Democracy – a long journey (2023). And then The Lost Decade 2010-2020 - and what lies ahead for Britain which is as good an account of the state of Britain in 2020 as you are likely to find (although without a single bibliographical reference!)
And it's interesting to compare audio and visual impressions of character. Videos offer the advantage of seeing the body language - which was particularly noticeable in the interview O'Brien conducted with one of the contenders for Tory leadership Rory Stewart some years ago. Stewart now runs (with Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair's spin doctor) the UK's best-known podcast and is a bit of a maverick by virtue of his commitment to traditional Conservative values which are now very much dead in the water. Stewart was clearly at one of these points in his life where he was having to consider his future – evident in the thought he gave to the questions.
All of these people, of course, are “celebrities” – well used to being interviewed – which perhaps limits what we might reasonably expect them to give away. Less so, perhaps, Toynbee who, as a journalist, is more used to writing than speaking although her fluency told us a lot about her sense of privilege about which Stewart was ready to confess.
Chris Hitchens had a great essay on Oriana Fallaci and the art of the Interview
Biographies of Journals
Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021)
Liberalism at Large – the world according to The Economist by Alexander Zevin (2019 reviewed in the New Yorke by the inimitable Pankaj Mishra
Pessimism of the Intellect – history of the New Left Review; Duncan Thompson (2007)
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