When the journalist Lynn Barber was 16, she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man who drew up in his sports car - and her life was almost wrecked. A bright confident girl, on course to go to Oxford, she began a relationship which, incredibly, was encouraged by her conventional, suburban parents and which took her into the louche, semi-criminal world of west London just as the 1960s began. Ruin beckoned, until one day she made an important discovery.
An Education , the opening piece of this fascinating memoir, was highly praised when first published in Granta magazine, and is currently being filmed by the BBC with a Nick Hornby script.
Lynn Barber was born in Bagshot in 1944 and read English at Oxford. She worked at Penthouse magazine for seven years and then at the Sunday Express, the Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, the Daily Telegraph and now at the Observer. She has won five British Press Awards and a What the Papers Say award. Her books include How to Improve Your Man in Bed and The Single Woman's Sex Book, as well as a study of Victorian naturalists, The Heyday of Natural History. A previous collection of her interviews, Mostly Men, was published in 1991. She is married, with two daughters, and lives in Highgate, London.
