From the Online

I was surprised, when reading part of a friend’s copy of Howard Marks’ autobiography, Mr Nice, last weekend (planning to get it out from the library this week) at his mention of a relationship with a certain Lynn Barber of St Anne’s college, Oxford. He called her ‘rivetingly glamourous’.

Barber, renowned interviewer, herself has written of their friendship, and also mentions a time when she was ‘briefly his girlfriend’ in a Telegraph review of said book (she finds Marks’ Mr Nice ‘devoid of introspection’).

In an the extract of Barber’s own memoir in today’s Observer Review she describes, in great detail (practice banana and all…), a two year romance with a (turns out to be married) older man, at age 16.

‘Simon’ has she calls him, or ‘Bubl’ as he likes her to call him, fuelled her subsequent mission to find ‘decent, straightforward boys’ at Oxford (one of whom she married).

Marks, however, must have been a little deviation: even if the notorious drug smuggler was on a steadier path at that 1960s point, he was anything but ’straightforward’.

The extract also made me smile for another reason: I remember Barber speaking at a Media Guardian student event a few years ago: she described how she’d told an interviewee (Julie Walters, if memory serves me correctly) that she didn’t have any children (she did) because she didn’t like the interviews getting personal, or onto too much common ground.

I think her interviewees will know rather more about her in future: the film of Barber’s memoir, An Education, is due for release in October and the book is on sale from June.

Barber says in today’s piece of the film: “[I]f anyone wants to believe that I was as pretty as Carey Mulligan [playing the 16 year old Barber] by all means go ahead…” She might put herself down, but the photo of the real Barber, age 17, does make her look rather (sweetly) glamourous.

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