Review[Barber’s] a suburban girl who’s frightened that she’s going to get cut out of everything good that happens in the city. That, to me, is a big story in popular culture. It’s the story of pretty much every rock ‘n’ roll band. (Nick Hornby, author of the screenplay adaptation of An Education ) Product DescriptionThe inspiration for the award-winning motion picture: "Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout."—Zoë Heller When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to precocious experience—an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber’s seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels and posh restaurants and trips abroad, expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist whose barbed interviews at once terrorized and fascinated her smart-set subjects. A poignant, shockingly candid account of the stages in a literary life—from promiscuity at Oxford to a stint at Penthouse to a complex marriage that endured—_An Education_ is a classic of English memoir.

Lynn Barber, by her own admission, has always suffered from a compelling sense of nosiness. An exceptionally inquisitive child she constantly questioned everyone she knew about imitate details of their lives. This talent for nosiness, coupled with her unusual lack of the very English fear of social embarrassment, is the perfect blend for a celebrity interviewer. Barber takes us through her early career at Penthouse where she started out interviewing foot fetishists, voyeurs, dominatrices and men who liked wearing nappies, through her later more eminent career at the Telegraph, Sunday Express, Vanity Fair, Observer and Sunday Times.Barber has interviewed a huge cross-section of celebrities throughout her career; politicians, film stars, comedians, dancers and musicians, including Gore Vidal, Rudolph Nureyev, Lady Gaga, James Stewart and Dirk Bogarde to name but a few. Characterised by her witty and honest style, A Curious Career is full of...