From Meghan and Harry to Salvador Dalí, Lynn Barber talks family, feuds, and fine art in Tatler’s July 2024 issue

‘I don’t quite see the point of being embarrassed,’ Fleet Street legend Lynn Barber tells Tatler’s David Jenkins in their sit-down conversation for our July 2024 issue. It’s a conversation as candid, insightful, and scandalous as you would expect from the six-time ‘Interviewer of the Year’ winner at the British Press Awards.

Her sharp eye and witty turn of phrase brought Barber wide-acclaim for works like An Education – her memoir of bigamous student seduction – and the rather self-explanatory How to Make Your Man Better in Bed. But now, Barber tells Tatler, she’s turned her attention to the many artists she’s encountered over her 80 years.

The fascination behind A Little Art Education came about, she reveals, after a scandalous dinner with Salavdor Dalí and his girlfriend (and his ocelot). With friends like Tracey Emin, feuds with the likes of the Chapman Brothers, and signed paintings from Gillian Ayres, who better than the brilliant Lynn Barber to walk us through the coteries of British art?

Growing up in Twickenham, studying in Oxford, and cutting her teeth at Penthouse magazine, Barber discusses a life spent undergoing the most esoteric of investigations, from all-night parties with aristocrats at the Venice Biennale, to in-depth discussions regarding sexualised amputeeism. She sets rumours to rights – what really happened with that Nick Nolte Vanity Fair interview? Who said what to Marianne Faithfull about a dog? – and talks Tracey’s salacious Christmas cards.