Clik here to view.
Nick Hornby: Foreword for Bill Grundy's interview with Sex Pistols
The first person to say "fuck" on television was Kenneth Tynan, in 1965 - everyone knows that. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne was the next to explete, in 1973, but Worsthorne's effort is mostly forgotten...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Malcolm McLaren: Afterword on Bill Grundy's interview with the Sex Pistols
I was born in London just after the war. My parents soon separated and my grandmother took charge of my upbringing. My grandmother had impressed on me at an early age that the English were a nation of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great interviews of the 20th century: The Sex Pistols interviewed by Bill Grundy
This interview is a transcript of Bill Grundy's interview with the Sex Pistols on December 1 1976, broadcast by Thames Television on the Today programmeThe original Sex Pistols line-up are seated -...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Scaring White America: Malcolm X
Playboy's timing couldn't have been better. In this interview in May 1963 it caught Malcolm X at the pinnacle of his most combative black nationalist phase and America in the grip of racial turmoil....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great interviews of the 20th century: Ian Kershaw on the interview with Adolf...
In 1932, Germany's democracy, which had emerged from the defeat of 1918, had entered its terminal phase. The army, most industrial leaders, and the big landholders, wanted an authoritarian system. And,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great interviews of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler interviewed by George...
This edited interview of Adolf Hitler by George Sylvester Viereck took place in 1923. It was republished in Liberty magazine in July 1932"When I take charge of Germany, I shall end tribute abroad and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great interviews of the 20th century: F Scott Fitzgerald interviewed by...
This is an edited version of "The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair" by Michel Mok, first published in the New York Post, September 25 1936Long ago, when he was young,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jay McInerney: Foreword for the interview with F Scott Fitzgerald by Michel Mok
Michel Mok's interview with Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most famous hatchet jobs of all time. Or at least, that's how I remembered it, and that's how Fitzgerald's biographers usually characterise it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A merry dance: Margaret Thatcher interviewed by Terry Coleman
Here's a little gem from the days when the Guardian, barely a decade after ceasing to be the Manchester Guardian, was still a single section broadsheet newspaper.No colour, not many pages, let alone...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great interviews of the 20th century: Margaret Thatcher interviewed by Terry...
This is an edited version of Terry Coleman's interview with Margaret Thatcher, first published in the Guardian, November 2 1971The capital and most valuable virtue of most Conservatives is their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Notoriety and popularity: Fidel Castro
The journalist Herbert Matthews' decision to find and interview the rebel guerrilla leader Fidel Castro in his mountain hideout, at a time when the US-backed military dictator Fulgencio Batista was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great interviews of the 20th century: Fidel Castro interviewed by Herbert...
This interview of Fidel Castro by Herbert Matthews took place in the Sierra Maestra, Cuba, February 16 1957. It was published in the New York Times, February 24 1957This article has been removed as our...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tilda Swinton: Foreword for Charlotte Chandler's interview with Mae West
By the time Charlotte Chandler went up to see Mae West at Ravenswood Apartments in Hollywood in 1979, her subject had been celebrated for nearly 60 years as the hoochy-coochying hussy, the Empress of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great interviews of the 20th century: Mae West interviewed by Charlotte Chandler
This is an edited version of Charlotte Chandler's interview with Mae West in Ravenswood Apts, Hollywood, in 1979Mae West held out her hand to me. As I took it, I scratched my palm on one of her diamond...
View ArticleBill Clinton discusses climate change, Africa, Kyoto, drug prices, HIV and...
The Guardian's health editor Sarah Boseley met former US president Bill Clinton in Rema, a hilltop village in northern Ethiopia. It is the country's first solar-powered village with all 1100 mud huts...
View ArticleVideo: Simon Hattenstone
Listen to Simon Hattenstone talking about some of his most memorable interviews, from Lou Reed's threatening behaviour, to being in bed with Jimmy Saville Continue reading...
View ArticleGreat interviews of the 20th century: Paul Laity, series editor
What makes a great interview?A skilful interviewer draws the subject out, letting them talk, easing this process of revelation. Unforeseen things happen; unexpected questions are asked. As a result,...
View ArticleMae West's obituary
Clancy Sigal remembers the inflatable, anti-hypocrital genius of the late Mae West"Is that a gun in your pocket - or are you just glad to see me?""When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm...
View ArticleMae West comes up
Then, in the voice Hollywood has made famous, she invited her audience to "Come around and see me in Manchester." The crowd was enchanted and some porters signified their approval of this invitation...
View ArticleFrom the archive: Castro still a demi-god
Fidelity of country CubansI had picked the house at random, along the dusty rutted track through the tobacco that leads down to Dayaniguas and the sea. Around us the fields were shaded with banyans and...
View ArticleAileen Ballantyne: Crowd's long cold wait for lady of the hour
Mr Callaghan had left Number 10 for the last time, with three briefcases, two holdalls, and two suitcases packed into the official black Rover. It had taken the chauffeur about five minutes to close...
View ArticleMalcolm Bradbury: The beautiful and damned
Zelda Fitzgerald: A Biography by Nancy MilfordThe following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday September 21 2007We made several mistakes in the...
View ArticleFrom the archives: The way to disarm nationalism
Dr GP Gooch, who presided, said "Many of us here greet the result of yesterday's poll in Germany with great satisfaction, we rejoice in President Hindenburg's victory not only on personal grounds as...
View ArticleMalcolm X's split with the Nation of Islam and the threats on his life
"The Negro has reached a point where he wants a change. He should reserve the right to use any means necessary to protect his rights." He told Manchester University Islamic Cultural Society that his...
View ArticleHelia Pick: Malcolm X has no shortage of enemies
Some suspicion falls on the Black Muslims, with whom Malcolm X quarrelled soon after President Kennedy's assassination. He has ever since been at odds with his former colleagues, and in fact has been...
View ArticleGrundy banned after Sex Pistols interview
Today team accusedMr Grundy was due to introduce another edition of the Today programme this evening. He spent two and a half hours with senior Thames executives for a postmortem on Wednesday night's...
View ArticleAlastair Cooke: Obituary of Marilyn Monroe
These stony sentences, which read like the epitaph of a Raymond Chandler victim, will confirm for too many millions of movie fans the usual melodrama of a humble girl, cursed by physical beauty, to be...
View ArticleGreat interviews of the 20th century: Joyce Carol Oates on Richard Meryman's...
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1 1926, in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital, the woman who came to be known as "Marilyn Monroe" was of a class of economically marginal Americans....
View ArticleGreat interviews of the 20th century: Marilyn Monroe interviewed by Richard...
This is an edited version of Last Talk With a Lonely Girl: Marilyn Monroe by Richard Meryman, first published in Life magazine, August 17 1962Sometimes wearing a scarf and a polo coat and no makeup and...
View ArticleMary Crozier: Francis Bacon on BBC1
This long interview with David Sylvester, the first time Bacon had ever appeared on BBC television, was extraordinarily full and interesting. It was certainly better with just the one person...
View ArticleEric Newson on the retrospective exhibition of work by Francis Bacon at the...
But what one eventually discovers is that even though Bacon is not averse to melodramatic tricks, they do not contain his essence. That essence is an uninhibited fearlessness, an unquestioning...
View ArticleDamien Hirst: Foreword on the interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
When I first read David Sylvester's interviews with Francis Bacon at the bushy-tailed, bright-eyed age of 16, they changed my life; it was the way into art for me. I read and re-read the interviews and...
View ArticleGreat interviews of the 20th century: Francis Bacon interviewed by David...
An edited extract from Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester in 1963, 1966 and 1979 Continue reading...
View ArticleNot fade away: The Singing Detective
From the archive: Alan Rusbridger on Dennis Potter's television masterpieceOne of the sadnesses of Dennis Potter's career was the eight-year gap in his work for the BBC before he returned to the fold...
View ArticleProgrammes from heaven - Dennis Potter's death
From the archive: Television's greatest writer is deadIn that brave and famous last interview Dennis Potter, who has died aged 59, made what he almost seemed to see as a confession to his audience: "I...
View ArticleBliss was it then to be in television | Nancy Banks-Smith
"O, but they say the tongues of dying men/Enforce attention like deep harmony."Richard II, Act II, Scene IHas anyone relished the delirious power of death as much as Dennis Potter? With a...
View ArticleVideo: Melvyn Bragg on Dennis Potter
Melvyn Bragg remembers his famous interview with Dennis Potter in April 1994, two months before he died Continue reading...
View ArticleGreat interviews of the 20th century: Dennis Potter interviewed by Melvyn Bragg
Edited version of Melvyn Bragg's interview of Dennis Potter on March 15 1994. It was broadcast by Channel 4 on April 5 1994Video: Melvyn Bragg remembers the Potter interviewMelvyn Bragg: How did you,...
View ArticleAn actor's journey: from electrifying youth to the heart of darkness
Marlon Brando 1924 - 2004There are no second acts in American lives, said F Scott Fitzgerald, and yet Marlon Brando, whose death was announced yesterday, had one of the most glorious imaginable.He...
View ArticleAndrew O'Hagan: Foreword for Truman Capote's interview with Marlon Brando
The chief purpose of the trip, from Capote's point of view, was to research a piece on a new Marlon Brando film, Sayonara, which was to be directed by Joshua Logan and shot on location in Kyoto. The...
View ArticleGreat interviews of the 20th century: Marlon Brando interviewed by Truman Capote
This is an edited version of Truman Capote's interview of Marlon Brando in Kyoto, Japan, 1957"Oh, hi," he said. "It's seven, huh?" We'd made a seven o'clock date for dinner; I was nearly 20 minutes...
View ArticleThe Beatles finally break up
As the Beatles finally break up, John Lennon says 'the dream is over'What remains? As far as groups like the Beatles are concerned, a great deal. Messrs Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr showed...
View ArticleOfficial Beatlemania
This article appeared in the Guardian in 1964, at the height of the Beatles' fameThe Beatles returned to Liverpool last night to attend the northern premiere of their film A Hard Day's Night.In case...
View ArticleEdward Pilkington: Blonde bombshell goes off
Edward Pilkington analyses the interview's probable fall-outSome speculated that it would be bland. It wasn't. Others said it would be dynamite. It was far more powerful than that.What the palace...
View ArticleForeword: Hilary Mantel on Martin Bashir's interview with Diana, Princess of...
In the autumn of 1995, a nation entertained daily by royal gossip - and familiar, thanks to a TV interview the year before, with the adulterous conduct of the Prince of Wales - settled before its...
View ArticleVideo: Lynn Barber's most memorable interviews
Observer writer Lynn Barber remembers some of her most entertaining and excruciating interviews Continue reading...
View Article
