No Longer With Us
By Naim Attallah,
Quartet, 823pp, £30/$33
It was Diana Mosley, as enchanting in her person as her politics were bewildering, who handed me Naim Attallah’s book of interviews, Singular Encounters, in 1991. Attallah was brilliant as an interviewer, she told me, praising particularly his “encounter” with William Rees-Mogg.
Many of the interviews featured in Singular Encounters are reprinted in this current book, together with others published in the Oldie, the magazine backed by Attallah in the 1990s. The selection features people, all of them now dead, who were eminent in arts, politics, business, the academy and the media. Sadly, interviews with Rees-Mogg and Auberon Waugh are not included. The absence of Rees-Mogg, who died in 2012 and who had interesting things to say about his Catholicism and the state of the Church since Vatican II, is curious in that his son, Jacob, is so much in the news.
