A Little Art Education by Lynn Barber review — why artists have more fun

People used to mock magazines like Penthouse for their incongruous mixture of softcore pornography padded out with longform literary journalism; though, if my Twitter feed is anything to go by, they were on to something. It was there, in the late 1960s, that Lynn Barber began her career as an interviewer. She ran Parameters of Sexuality, a regular column in which the magazine sought out people with unusual sexual tastes including amputation fetishists, voyeurs and men who liked wearing nappies. As a result, Barber mastered a non-judgmental style of questioning and an unerring instinct for detail (“Do you have a favourite limb?”).

Penthouse was also where she landed her first big celebrity interview with an artist. One day, Bob Guccione, the magazine’s founder, asked Barber