.jpg)
The Booker prize-winning author Julian Barnes has given a rare interview to Soumya Bhattacharya for the New Statesman centenary issue, out today, in which he shares his views on contemporary British politics and culture, recalls his time as a young literary editor on the New Statesman in the mid-to-late 1970s, and talks life, love and loss.
On Christopher Hitchens:
“He was the most brilliant talker I’ve met and the best argufier. At the Statesman he was largely gay, idly anti-Semitic and very left-wing. Then ripple-dissolve to someone who was twice married and had discovered himself to be Jewish and become a neocon. An odd progress, though he didn’t do the traditional shuffle to the right; he kept one left, liberal leg planted where it always had been and made a huge, corkscrewing leap with his right leg. I enjoyed his company but never entirely trusted him.”
On David Cameron and the Coalition Government:
“It seems perfectly possible that David Cameron will be remembered as the prime minister who ‘lost’ Scotland and took Britain out of Europe. But then, this is a government with rare powers: who thought you could manage to produce a fall in unemployment combined with a triple-dip recession?”
On culture in England:
“This has always been a comparatively philistine country […] this has made the arts – and many artists – resilient and ingenious in the face of poverty.”
On Rupert Murdoch:
“Murdoch once sacked me when I was on the Sunday Times […] I do believe in grudge-bearing […] I think his effect on public life in this country has been malign.”
On death and euthanasia:
“I don’t want to be a nonagenarian waking up with broken ribs because I have been artificially resuscitated against my will.”
On the New Statesman, his first desk job in Fleet Street:
“I felt deep loyalty to the magazine and couldn’t believe my luck that I was working for it. There was even a ping-pong table in the basement.”
“They [Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton and Martin Amis] were very confident talkers. I was virtually mute in those days. I would sit through editorial conferences praying that Tony Howard [then editor] wouldn’t nod encouragingly in my direction.”
On Fleet Street in the 1970s:
“I found it a friendly and collegiate world, if over-male; and, yes, where you were going to drink was a daily subject of debate.”
To read the full interview, buy a copy of the New Statesman Centenary Issue, on sale now.
Content from our partners
Related
