When the journalist Lynn Barber was 16, she was picked up at a bus-stop by an older man who drew up in his sports car - and her life was almost wrecked. A confident girl on course to go to Oxford, she began a relationship which was encouraged by her suburban parents that took her into the semi-criminal world of west London just as the 1960s began.

Lynn Barber studied English at Oxford University. She began her career in journalism at Penthouse, and has since worked for a number of major British newspapers and for Vanity Fair. She currently writes for the Observer. She has published two volumes of her celebrated interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber.