CPR* - CAROLINE PHILLIPS - JOURNALISM - PUBLIC RELATIONS

The Caroline Phillips Interview

Margaret Drabble: ‘I can live with my husband now’

The writer Margaret Drabble lives in a Hampstead house and Michael Holroyd, the husband to whom she is devoted, lives in Ladbroke Grove. It is an arrangement that London's top-drawer literary couple have maintained since their secret wedding in 1982. But now she wants to move in with him.

When they entertain, they sleep at her house; when they go to the airport, they spend the night at his. “We speak every day,” says Drabble of Holroyd, the enigmatic man of letters who received a record advance of £625,000 for his biography of George Bernard Shaw.

The Evening Standard, 10.02.92

Lord Bath: Law and disorder of the Bath

The air is close with the smell of sweaty old feet and unwashed plates. He has stained bedsheets, pillows with red hearts, lopsided posters of Monet and Manet, screaming pink, yellow and red paint work and a cupboard full of blouses with flounces, frills, embroidery and twirls. It could be a bohemian student squat. But his doorbell on the Fifties block states simply “Bath”.

This is the home of the 7th Marquess of Bath, Alexander Thynn, 64, dubbed the Loins of Longleat in reference to his multifarious romantic interests and the safari lions at his £150 million, 10,000 acre Elizabethan stately home in Wiltshire.

The Express, 19.04.97

Harry Enfield: Money, sex and the neuroses of Enfield man

Comedian Harry Enfield has a nightmare. It is rooted in a childhood experience. “The only violent dream I ever had is of beating a monk, Father Gaisford, around the head with a cricket bat. I completely bashed him.” Father Gaisford was at Worth Abbey, a Catholic public school, which Enfield found horrifying. He was there for two years between the ages of 13 and 15, before his parents took him away early. “My abiding image is of 14 boys lined up just before Christmas in 1974 outside the headmaster's study, each one going in to be beaten. It was like something out of Tom Brown's Schooldays.”

The Evening Standard, 19.03.92