A Curious Career by Lynn Barber – review

Lynn Barber claims that the most frightening thing anyone ever said to her was a remark by a doctor about to operate on her back, who promised they'd have her walking again in a fortnight – "or if we don't, we'll send Jimmy Savile to visit you". This happened even before her tour of Stoke Mandeville hospital in 1990, when she watched Savile himself bend down to murmur to a young female paraplegic: "Aha, now I can have my way with you, my dear!"

In A Curious Career Barber recalls asking Savile if it was true that he liked little girls. It was a bold question but what she doesn't mention is that she believed him when he said no. The strange thing about all her best interviews – including the one with Savile – is that they are based in the end on admiration, even if it's only for the subject's monstrous vanity, colossal cheek or compulsive lying.

Admittedly there is nothing in this latest book of memoirs to match her elegant, effortless skewering of Harriet Harman, or the scarifyingly sharp, subtle probing that worked so well in the past on actors like Stephen Fry, William Hurt and Richard E Grant. Actors more than most need to beware of Barber, especially in fake confessional mode ("Basically, there is almost no way into the inner life of actors, and God knows I've tried"). Others in the high-risk category are sportsmen, academics and bores, by which she means anyone too polite or not extrovert enough to strip down at sight to the bleeding core.

The eight or nine interviews included here are unexpectedly affectionate portraits because, at heart, Barber likes people, which is why she wants to know what makes them tick. She certainly made the most of her trade name, Demon Barber, but, as she says herself, she's more of a pussycat these days. The nearest we come to the old demon is her graphic account of Rafa Nadal fiddling with his underpants on court (he made the mistake of receiving her in his hotel suite in Rome lying on a bed with his flies open).

It was not a wise move. Nor was Marianne Faithfull's dodge of keeping her interviewer waiting for two hours during a photo session with David Bailey, which ended with Barber shouting, stamping and walking out. "When I get back … Marianne, in a black mac and fishnet tights, is sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs, doing sex‑kitten moues at the camera." Faithfull hit back afterwards by claiming she'd been asked if she'd ever had sex with a dog, which riled Barber so much she threatened to sue.

The critical point of these interviews is power, and who has it. Barber has always been generous with do-it-yourself tips – bone up first, be interested, get under the subject's skin – but the key is always the same: stay in control (this includes pretending to lose it, as she did with Faithfull, "probably the most enjoyable interview I've ever done") so as to make them lose it. She has useful techniques for "getting the bile flowing before an interview", defusing tension deceptively early on and tripping the subject up later if things start running too smoothly. Old pros recognise these ploys but can't always withstand them. Toby Young capitulated – "I was fucked" – almost before their duel began. Honours remained roughly even with Muriel Spark, who made Barber feel she was inching up a rock face (and that's certainly how the interview reads). But even Barber can't help being "suckered by charm", spectacularly so ("I surrendered") after five minutes with Boris Johnson.

Her own early history has largely passed into legend but can still do with rehashing here. The only child of uptight lower middle-class parents, she was seduced as a schoolgirl by a conman almost twice her age before moving on to Oxford, then London and her first regular job at Penthouse. She spent the next seven years interviewing sex fetishists – voyeurs, transvestites, dominatrices, shoe fans, rubber fans and men who wore nappies. Never having met a pretty, witty young Oxford graduate before, they turned her training into a doddle because "these people were always so eager, even grateful to talk". Keenest of all was Salvador Dalí who kept her at it in Paris for four days on end, shouting "More! More!" whenever her questions showed signs of drying up.

She was still in her 20s when she wrote How to Improve Your Man in Bed, the first female sex manual since Marie Stopes's Married Love, but much funnier and more down-to-earth (it's still her favourite of all her books, and her standby wedding present). After a few years off to have babies and another seven on the Sunday Express, she switched to the Independent on Sunday, which made her an overnight sensation at the age of 46.

Her interviews widened the field to include celebrities of all sorts – pop stars for preference – shifting the emphasis away from academic deference, impersonality and firsthand research towards something more like an eye-catching, stomach-churning spectator sport: "above all what I like and need is the competitive edge of going where many journalists have gone before, and trying to do better". Barber's boast is that she asked all the questions other people want answered but were too embarrassed to ask themselves. She could hardly have taken her remit more seriously, going to bed early the night before and suffering terribly from stage fright on the day itself. Her crack interviews are clearly as much of an ordeal for her as for her subjects – but risk and danger on both sides are what keep us all watching as she briskly rattles the bones in their closets.

Barber still claims not to understand how she came to be known and feared as the rottweiler of Fleet Street. This seems a bit rich coming from someone whose first book of memoirs described her ferociously loud-mouthed, ill-tempered and tyrannical father as the Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious of pensioners. Barber insists there's never "a single toe-bone of a skeleton" in her own cupboard but if she were my subject, that's where I'd start digging.

Her extreme frankness about everyone else is matched by conspicuous caginess when it comes to those closest to her, especially her daughters and her late husband ("he made me a better person"). She is unnecessarily respectful to literary heavyweights such as Spark and Hilary Mantel, and disconcertingly girlish about meeting fashionable Young Brit artists like Sarah Lucas ("I have never so much since school wanted to call someone my friend"), and Tracey Emin ("doing the biennale with Tracey was probably the most glamorous week of my life").

But Barber undercuts any charge of smugness or self-indulgence by glorying in her own success, her six British Press awards ("I adore them"), her celebrity status ("I love stars") and the privileges it brings ("I saw my first ever glass washbasin in Elaine Paige's penthouse"). Being interviewed by her confers the same sort of public recognition today as appearing on Desert Island Discs. Twenty years ago she wondered why Spark hadn't been made a dame (of course she became one shortly afterwards). Now I feel the same about her.

Barber turned the interview into an art form that, in her own words, "sings the strangeness and variety of the human race". She defines it as a conjuring trick, "an attempt to read someone's character in an indecently short space of time". Like all the best conjurors, she relies on speed, practice, psychological insight, a powerful imagination and phenomenally acute observation. For nearly half a century she has held up a mirror in which her contemporaries see themselves reflected with a precision and panache most novelists would envy – and most biographers too. Readers worldwide will be as relieved as I was by her pledge at the end of this book: "I will never voluntarily retire. They will have to prise my gnarled fingers from the keyboard."