Passionate, proselytising, innovative and controversial managing director of the Body Shop who has just written a manifesto of an autobiography called Body and Soul, which is printed on recycled paper and signed ‘Anita X’. Former teacher turned role model with financial acumen and vision. Enter, powered by very fast and lead-free feet, Anita Roddick – also known as Miss Mega-Mouth.

She’s sitting among her caring products wearing an Against Animal Testing T-shirt and Workers for Freedom trousers, plus Brazilian Indian bangle from a people who now gather nuts for her products – the sort of garb she says she wears for an important meeting.

She exudes enormous energy – she’s constantly picking and fiddling; she finds it hard to sit still – and a fan is stirring everything else up so that the entire room seems to be agitated.

‘I’m manic about comfort. So trousers, flat shoes, never comfortable with high heels’ – she abbreviates to get more ideas into a sentence faster. (Curiously when I see her later at her book launch, she’s wearing an A-line skirt and clumpy high heels.) ‘So what do I tend to do?’ She asks her own question, then answers it. She also often interrupts and starts to reply to a question before I’ve finished asking it.

She has appealing looks: wonderful wild hair, a strong face and deep-brown eyes. (Beauty, according to her tome, comes from an inner energy.) ‘I’m short, with untamed hair and quite good bones. I’ve inherited my mother’s skin. I’m Italian-shaped, dumpy’ – she doesn’t appear to be – ‘low-waisted and with an incredibly mobile mouth.’

At 5ft 2in, she’s yearning to be 5ft 6in. ‘God, wouldn’t you? I mean just being in a crowd for a start, I’m talking to people’s belly buttons the whole time,’ says this mini powerhouse, in an enthusiastic voice born of Littlehampton Italian stock with added American intonations. She speaks lucidly, with a wide-ranging vocabulary and histrionic emphasis; an almost forced energy in her voice.

She is a love child who’s said she is the greatest snogger in the world and that in the Sixties she bonked her brains out. ‘It’s ironic that the more successful I become, the less I’m perceived as sexy. But I’m so sensual,’ she has said.

‘You’re not flirted with and any sexual frisson has gone because you’re in a so-called leadership role,’ she says. ‘I’m constantly told I’m a role model. And when you’re a role model you can’t fart in company and you can’t scratch your bloody nose.’ She doesn’t think she’s sexy. ‘Oooh, absolutely not.’

She says she’s into her husband rather than ‘flesh, flesh, flesh . . . And when you’re told constantly that the world loves you, which I am by my staff, you end up wondering who really does’.

She reckons she bonds better with women and this seems to be a key. She says she feels more mellow and at ease with females, and less judged. ‘I’m getting increasingly less comfortable with men. And I have much more admiration for women.’

And what of her image? ‘I think I’m gentler than I’m seen to be. Every time I read an article about myself, I think I sound so strident. My great sense of humour doesn’t come out. You know, it’s like I want to say, ‘Get off the bloody bandwagon’, sometimes.’

She is not warm, though from the caring image one might have expected her to be, and she is very earnest. She has a single-mindedness – here’s a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it – and a driven quality born perhaps of a sense of loss when her father died when she was a child. She also comes over as rehearsed – she doesn’t really connect, she’s just doing her publicity. But she can laugh at herself, and she’s attractively directed and exuberant.

‘I’m incredibly passionate about some issues. I have a nine-year-old’s enthusiasm and curiosity’ – she has two girls, aged 20 and 22. ‘I don’t think I’m brave. I’m not elegant and certainly not mature. I dislike my impatience. I’m kind, caring, empathetic. I’m beyond self-aggrandisement. I sleep well at night. I’m proud of what I’ve done.’

She’s also Italian. What does that mean to her? Does she feel different? ‘Oh yeah.’ She feels very comfortable with loudness, passion, extended families and colour. ‘I also use it as a guise to get my own way. People excuse you because they say, ‘Oh, she’s Italian’. I use it as an excuse for getting incredibly emotional. And in business, to get your own way, you have to use as many guiles and tricks as you can.’

Is she manipulative? ‘I think I’d do anything to get what I want in terms of my vision for the company.’

She climbs on soap boxes to sell soap. ‘Abso-bloody-lutely right. If anyone thought I’d be doing anything else, they’d be living on another planet. The shops are arenas for social change.’ She is perhaps too earnest. ‘No, I don’t think I’m serious enough.’

She experienced her dark side during the Gulf War. ‘I felt a real abject loneliness then. I felt so isolated. This belief that we’re on the edge of great social change seemed just puffery.’

Why does she interpret nearly all her strong feelings in this sort of global manner? ‘Isn’t there a you that you experience separate and unrelated to these world issues?’ I ask.

‘What separates you is what you do,’ she replies, launching into a dissertation on the difficulties of galvanising support for the unexotic North Sea problems.

Yes, yes, but who is Anita Roddick separate from the Great Causes? ‘When I was 10 years old I was marching for CND. That is the character.’ So what’s the psychological reason for this need to be out there marching and so on? This need for Sixties activism.

‘Maybe it is emotional, I think, I mean . . .’ This is the first time she stumbles in the interview, as if something inside her is touched. ‘At 10 years old, it’s such a raw age anyway, my father died. He was such a wondrous person to me. And I know that the catalyst happened then. ‘I also got hold of a book on the Holocaust. So there was a loss and a shock. These two areas actually combined, emotionally triggering off that enormous anger. A kick-start into wanting to right wrongs.’

She fears death, but says that she no longer feels turbulent. ‘There used to be this sort of panic that went on, this frenetic ‘I’ve got to see more, I’ve got to do more’ feeling.’

And is she dictatorial? (One imagines she might be.) She walks off jokingly, as if to consult her staff. ‘I’m incredibly acquiescent on some things. But in the areas that are to do with the image of the company, I’m a screaming harridan.’ She delivers the line with a conspiratorial hiss to her audience.

And does she like herself? ‘Yeah,’ she says with a dismissive tone. ‘I love myself.’