Forty-five years after Simon & Garfunkel split up, the singer is still consumed with bitterness

I hear Art Garfunkel before I see him, singing to himself as he drifts across the hotel lobby in a blue T-shirt, heading for the lifts. At 73 his golden curls have become white dandelion seeds, and he is not as tall as you might imagine — an illusion that was probably created during all those years standing next to the diminutive Paul Simon.

As I’m early, I hang back and wait for him to reappear. When he does, he has changed into a white shirt and is carrying a large manila envelope. He tilts back his head to study me through black-framed glasses before proffering his left hand to shake, explaining that he trapped his right one in a door. We find a quiet corner in the bar area and instead of ordering a coffee – it is 10am – he asks for a bowl of pea soup.

Oh good, I think, this is going to be a memorable encounter.

“I’m allowing myself to be victimised here,” he says, jiggling his knee, not making eye contact.

By me? “By the press. I’m nervous.”

Really? Someone who can sing in front of half a million people (as he and Paul Simon did in 1981 for that historic, but temporary, reunion “the concert in Central Park”)? “Oh, I was nervous there, too. You feel vulnerable. Exposed. You might forget a lyric. It’s brave work, this work. I want you to respect it.”

But I do, I say, I do – which is why I’ve already bought my tickets to see him in concert when he returns to London in the autumn, to play at the Royal Albert Hall. ‘Gorgeous acoustics,’ he says, relaxing a little at this. It will be a tour of seven cities, and it nearly didn’t happen because in 2010 he suffered from a “paresis” of his vocal chords. “Since I lost my voice – and I have now almost fully recovered it – the loud, high notes haven’t quite come back, so I need a mic for volume.”

When the middle range of his voice went, he was devastated. “I teased it back by singing in empty theatres. I would sing, and crap out, and my knees would buckle and I would whimper in frustration. I didn’t know how I was going to carry on. Was I going to be some guy named Walter who doesn’t sing? Did I have to get a regular job instead? I’ve been singing since I was five. It’s my identity. I can get away with murder when I sing.”

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, prior to their split in 1970 (Picture: Rex)

He is often described in terms of that goosebump-inducing voice of his – “angelic”, “haunting” and so on. But when I ask him to describe himself he says: “I’m a misanthrope.” There is something in that, given what he will go on to say about his father, and Paul McCartney, and Paul Simon. But I would also add “eccentric”. Take his habit of listing on his website every book he has ever read. “You notice it’s heavy sh*t,’ he says. ‘It’s not fluff.”

Since Simon & Garfunkel split up in 1970, he has married twice and raised two sons, had a film career, walked across America and Europe – ”to get away from people” – and continued recording.

Although his solo hits (Bright Eyes, I Only Have Eyes for You) were written by other people, and though Paul Simon wrote all the Simon & Garfunkel songs, he does write. Prose poems, mostly. In long hand. “I never bought a computer or a cell phone.”

He also does a lot of mathematics, having read it as a student at Columbia. “I’m precise. I think in proportions. I play games with numbers and I proportionalise. I imagine we have now done 1/8th of our interview.” I check my watch.

He even took a job as a maths teacher at one point, in the Seventies, despite being a world famous pop star.

“I’d just got married and moved to Connecticut, and there was a nearby preparatory school and so I taught math there. It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions and they would say: “What were the Beatles like?”

At the risk of sounding like one of his pupils, I ask about the Beatles, specifically George, who felt his talents were overshadowed.

“George came up to me at a party once and said “my Paul is to me what your Paul is to you.” He meant that psychologically they had the same effect on us. The Pauls sidelined us. I think George felt suppressed by Paul and I think that’s what he saw with me and my Paul. Here’s the truth: McCartney was a helluva music man who gave the band its energy, but he also ran away with a lot of the glory.”

Shortly before they split up, Simon & Garfunkel released what was to become the (then) biggest selling album in history, Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Why did they walk away from that phenomenal success?

“It was very strange. Nothing I would have done. I want to open up about this. I don’t want to say any anti Paul Simon things, but it seems very perverse to not enjoy the glory and walk away from it instead. Crazy. What I would have done is take a rest from Paul, because he was getting on my nerves. The jokes had run dry.

But a rest of a year was all I needed. I said: ‘I’m not married yet. I want to jump on a BMW motorbike and tour round Europe chasing ladies.’”

Did he have a seduction technique? “I had it down to an art form. When you sign autographs after a show, you see the real pretty one and make sure you get to her last. Then you ask, ever so casually, ‘Have you had dinner?’”

Paul Simon once said that it upset him that audiences thought Garfunkel had written his masterpiece, the song Bridge Over Troubled Water – because Garfunkel sang it as a solo, with piano accompaniment.

“I saw that quote, too. But how many songs did I sing upfront and have a real tour de force of vocal? Does he resent that I had that one? I find that ungenerous.”

It’s an intriguing answer, one that makes me suspect that Paul Simon is not only a musical genius – that overused word seems appropriate – but also an insecure man who has to be the centre of attention. When I mention that I went to see Paul Simon and Sting at the O2 a few weeks ago, Garfunkel sits forward. “Oh tell me, I’m curious. Did he do Bridge Over Troubled Water?”

“It was a gamble that he did that. And when they did it, was Sting on the arrangement?”

Sting and Paul Simon on stage together as part of their 2015 world tour

When I say he was, Garfunkel jiggles his knee again, looks over his shoulder, reaches into his manila envelope and produces a clutch of his prose poems marked with pink Post-it labels and reads one to me. It is about a zebra.

He’s a hard man to get the measure of, Art Garfunkel.

On the one hand he still seems eaten up by bitterness about his divorce from Paul Simon, yet he also talks about his old friend (they were at school together) with deep affection.

Simon and Garfunkel during their reunion tour in 2003 (Picture: AP)

He can seem vainglorious, too, referring to his own “beautiful” voice and being a “helluva singer”, but egomania is not incompatible with self-doubt, or misanthropy. And perhaps if he was nervous about this interview it was to do not with what I would ask but what he would answer.

He grew up in Queens, New York, a few blocks away from Paul Simon (they attended the same high school and started impersonating the Everly Brothers when they were 13). But what about his home? Was there singing there?

“Dad played rudimentary piano and sang with my mum, in thirds, but it was all middlebrow stuff.”

His father was a travelling salesman of men’s coats.

“At the end of the war there were a lot of surplus bomber jackets that needed to be unloaded. He travelled in the north east, four-day trips with sample cases in the trunk. Lately I’ve been thinking why did he not want to stay home with us more? Did he have a girlfriend on the road? I think the man who goes through his adult life as if he was born to carry a burden on his back has an inferiority complex. He thinks his place is not to stand up with dignity but to carry the samples.”

He sips a spoonful of pea soup as his 24-year-old son, Art Junior, appears and says hello, before heading off to wait at the bar.

“We were estranged for a while,” he says. “Aged 16, my kid created a distance. He broke my heart a little. Now he’s moving back to love of family. For these shows I’m going to bring him on stage. We harmonise. He’s got the singing gift.”

When I ask what advice he has given his son he makes me laugh with his answer: “Watch out for traffic.” Anything else? “Be kind to people. I’m working on that second one myself, because I’m not always kind. I’m judgemental and picky. When I order room service and they get it wrong I try so hard to be kind and I fail. ‘But I only asked for three things! How could you get one wrong?’

“Or to the taxi driver: ‘How can this be hard? Listen to the address and take me there. Don’t you care about your job?'”

I say there is one more question I have to ask, and he will have guessed what it is.

“Will I do another tour with Paul? Well, that’s quite do-able. When we get together, with his guitar, it’s a delight to both of our ears. A little bubble comes over us and it seems effortless. We blend. So, as far as this half is concerned, I would say, ‘Why not, while we’re still alive?’

“But I’ve been in that same place for decades. This is where I was in 1971.”

He then seems to address not me but his old friend. “How can you walk away from this lucky place on top of the world, Paul? What’s going on with you, you idiot? How could you let that go, jerk?”

Actually, another question strikes me. I speculate about whether Paul Simon might have a Napoleon complex. Is there a height thing there, between them?

“I think you’re on to something. I would say so, yes.”

He adds that at school he felt sorry for Paul because of his height, and he offered him love and friendship as a compensation. “And that compensation gesture has created a monster. End of interview.”

When he drifts off back to the lifts, singing to himself again, I check my watch. Turns out his mental clock, when he guessed how far we were through the interview, was exactly right.

Impeccably dressed and naturally convivial, Bill Nighy is happiest in his own company. He talks to Nigel Farndale about football, staring at trees and riding a motorbike with Judi Dench

Bill Nighy has suggested we meet in Notting Hill, in a café run by an Italian family who really know their coffee. His ritual is to come here for an espresso on his way to his favourite Indian restaurant nearby, where he likes to sit and eat on his own while reading a book. But even if he wasn’t a regular here, I suspect he would still be recognised by the waiters, because he never tries to disguise himself in public. On the contrary, he always seems to look like someone doing an impersonation of Bill Nighy.

It’s to do with his black-framed glasses and the bespoke navy suits he wears over open-necked shirts. Today he arrives in an overcoat and midnight-blue silk scarf with white polka dots, which also seems very Bill Nighy. He wears these elegant clothes well, but doesn’t he ever feel like dressing more casually? Putting on a T-shirt and jumper? “Actually,” he says in that mellow and unhurried voice of his, “I never wore T-shirts even when I was supposed to wear them. Never felt I had the right shape. Couldn’t do a T-shirt justice. And I don’t do unshaven well either. It makes me look like someone about to have a breakdown.”
The film team review The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Guardian

He is keenly aware of his own absurdities, which not only include his sartorial “fetishism” (his word) but also a fairly manic obsession with football (in general and Crystal Palace in particular), and music (again in general, but especially Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones). He can’t help it; he has a compulsive nature – one that, like his professed “crippling self-consciousness”, seems to be at odds with the insouciance and languor of his public persona.

But does he ever catch himself stepping into a sort of Bill Nighy character when he leaves his house, playing up to people’s expectations? “Not really, no. I always assume when I meet people in the street that they are going to be basically disappointed. But there’s, what’s the word? There’s no… what is the word? No conflict. There’s no conflict between the private me and the public me.”

The public him, the actor, has had a career that can be divided into two halves. The first got off to a wobbly start. Struggling to find work in the early 70s, he gave up acting and took a job on a market stall in Croydon selling women’s clothes. “Then someone put me up for an audition at the Everyman in Liverpool and my life changed.” The Everyman – where the resident writers were Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale – was a hotbed of socialism and agitprop. That must have been a shock to his system, given that his father, who ran a small garage in Caterham, Surrey, was a Tory.

“Yes, I was a mess of anxiety and general unease,” he says. “I had somehow managed not to learn the difference between Left and Right, and when I got to the Everyman it was too late to ask. I took the Times in one day and the director took it off me and threw it across the room in disgust.”

From the Everyman he progressed to the National Theatre, where he worked with David Hare, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. But this wasn’t a happy period in his life. Wracked with insecurity about work and money, and suffering from chronic stage fright, he developed an “unhealthy relationship” with alcohol, a dependence he wasn’t to kick until 1992. To this day he still doesn’t like to talk about it.

Then in 2003, at the age of 53, he became highly bankable almost overnight when he won two Baftas, one for playing a newspaper editor in the TV drama State of Play, and another for his role as a washed-up but endearing rock star in the Richard Curtis romcom Love Actually. He appreciates what that film did for him (not least that it got him out of ever having to do an audition again), but he is a bit scratchy about people assuming that his acting career began that year. “I did go through a phase of politely pointing out that I had been around as an actor for a long time before that.”

One legacy of the first half of his career was that he found it hard to turn work down when the second half began. He has averaged three or four films a year since, but has become choosier lately. And his bankability as a film star has meant he can also afford to take up offers of theatre work when the mood takes him. His recent West End performance opposite Carey Mulligan in a revival of David Hare’s Skylight won him much acclaim, and he enjoyed doing it so much he is about to head off to Broadway to do it again, for a four-month run.
Nighy in 1985’s Pravda with Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Baines and Peter Blythe
Curtain raiser: Nighy (right) in 1985’s Pravda at the National Theatre with Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Baines and Peter Blythe. Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex

The play is set in the post-Thatcher early 90s, and as with all David Hare plays, there are some comic lines in it. There is also an anti-Thatcherite political message – one with which, you suspect, Nighy agrees. Although he doesn’t like to align himself with any one party, his politics are broadly on the Left, and if you want to get him on the subject of the Robin Hood Tax, which is a levy on financial transactions, you should settle down for a half-hour lecture. He lobbies about it on behalf of Oxfam at G8 summits.

But the reason members of the public always approach him as if they know him, as if he is an old friend, is not because they expect a lecture on politics. It’s because they think he will make them smile. And it is easy to see how they might confuse him with the parts he plays: all those amusing tics and mannerisms you see on film are his, as is that hesitant voice and delivery. It can all seem like self-parody when you meet him in person.

One of the first things you notice about Bill Nighy is his hands. He suffers from Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition that causes some of his fingers to bend in towards the palm, which can make shaking hands with fans difficult. Does it hurt? “Not at all. It started in my 20s. It was alarming and I should have had an operation on them at the time, but I didn’t because I was a mess and was frightened.” He holds up his left hand. “It means I have a spooky handshake.”

The hands have become part of what makes him distinctive as an actor, affecting as they do the way he moves and holds himself, so much so that some young actors assume it is an affectation. “They come up to me and say: ‘I like that thing you do with your hands.’”

The hands are, as it were, something he has to bring to every role, and they make him an easy target for mimicry. I came across a sketch online in which Harry Enfield plays Bill Nighy playing Hugh Grant in a Richard Curtis romcom. It’s all “Gosh!” and “What a clot!” and it is cruelly well observed, not least because Nighy always seems to play a version of himself in Richard Curtis films, notably The Boat That Rocked (2009) and About Time (2013).

He is aware of this, and does sometimes go out of his way to avoid it, as he did for last year’s Pride, a film about a group of gay activists who supported the miners during their strike. Not only did he look different in that, with his slicked-down hair, but he sounded very different, too: Welsh, in fact. (“To get the accent right,” he says, “I went down to Wales and hung about in pubs with a tape recorder asking people to speak my lines.”) But even in Pirates of the Caribbean, when he was speaking with a Scottish accent and had his face obscured by octopus legs, Bill Nighy was still unmistakably Bill Nighy.
Nighy in the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Judi Dench and Celia Imrie
Nighy plays ‘an absent-minded and charming adaptation of himself’ in the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/BBC/Neal Street Productions

In his latest film, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, out this month, he is very much back to playing an absent-minded and charming adaptation of himself. It is a follow-up to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was a surprise box-office hit in 2011 (surprise because it was about old people setting up a retirement home in India). The sequel has all the warmth and gentle humour of the first and sees Nighy riding around Jaipur on a motorbike with Dame Judi Dench on the back for the second time. “I’m still hopeless on a motorbike,” he says. “Took 17 takes. I don’t know why they didn’t use a stunt rider in long shot.”

Does he imagine he will end up in a retirement home like that one day? “I’m hoping not to retire. What do we hope for? Go to bed and don’t wake up, I suppose.” Actually, he contemplates mortality much more than this glib answer would suggest. “I probably think about death 12 times a day,” he says. “I measure my life in Champions Leagues. How many do I have left?”

But he also has other ways to fill his days. “When I’m working I have to get up at five, so when I’m not I like to get up at 10,” he says. “I put on some John Lee Hooker, shave, then go round to the café for a leisurely breakfast with two football pages. Then I go to the bookshop for a browse. Then I drink coffee very slowly in a café near Berkeley Square.”
Bill Nighy photographed by Alex Lake Jan 2015 For Observer Magazine.
Bill Nighy. Photograph: Alex Lake

He has a thing for Berkeley Square. “I love studying the plane trees. They overwhelm me. As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I’m greedy for beauty.” He concedes that his perfect day is really “wandering about London on my own. I built my life around not being in a hurry.”

And in the evening? “In the evening I like to eat in an Indian restaurant on my own and then go home and watch football matches. I have Sky Plus-ed. I record the whole season. The Spanish league, too.”

For 23 years he lived with the actor Diana Quick, the mother of his daughter Mary (who is also an actor, and director, and to whom Nighy is close). But the couple separated in 2008 and nowadays he seems to prefer his own company. Or at least I think he does. Is there someone he comes home to? “No, Nigel,” he says, his mouth a horizontal slab, twitching at the corners. “I don’t come home to anyone. I live alone, and if I was in a relationship and I were to tell you about it I would involve your readers in something approaching gossip, and I know they would never forgive me for that.”

What about friends? Sounds a bit lonely, this day he has described. “I do have friends, honestly I do have some, but I sort of enjoy my own company and I don’t do that thing of: ‘Let’s all get together.’ I would never throw a party. Wouldn’t know whom to invite.”

Richard Curtis? David Hare? Dame Judi? “I suppose. Maybe. Maybe it would be more of a dinner party. I did once give a dinner party. But it was a long time ago and it won’t happen again.”

A poignant note on which to end. It is time for the spooky parting handshake. He retrieves his scarf, exchanges a few friendly words with some members of the public who have recognised him, and heads outside to wander about on his own and stare at trees.

Jamie Dornan is a happily married, Guardian-reading feminist with a daughter. So how come he’s so persuasive as a serial killer in The Fall? And what about all this bondage sex in Fifty Shades of Grey? By Nigel Farndale

The photo shoot done, Jamie Dornan is ushered away to a quiet corner of the studio by his publicist, who needs to brief him for five minutes on his international press schedule. Requests, requests. They do not concern the new series of The Fall, his sophisticated and critically acclaimed crime drama that starts again on BBC2 this month. They relate to the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey, which is not being released until February yet is already bulging over the 32-year-old actor like a heavy nimbus cloud.

We shall come to that. For now I watch him as he finds himself standing next to a vaulting horse. As he listens to his publicist, he takes hold of its sides and raises himself up, his 6ft frame forming a gravity-defying diagonal behind him in the air. Seeing this impressive gymnastic feat, the photographer stops packing away his camera and starts clicking again.

When the photographs are done, we walk to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and Dornan tells me it was just as well the photographer didn’t ask him to do a second take, because “I would have been crying in the corner if he had.” He broke his shoulder a few years ago, and “stupidly I put off having surgery on it until last year”.

He doesn’t realise he is doing these exercises half the time, he adds. In fact, he thinks he is “probably quite irritating to live with” because he has a condition which means his adrenaline levels are abnormally high, so he is always dropping to the floor at home and doing press-ups. “I’m quite hyper, and my wife [he married the singer-songwriter Amelia Warner last year] would prefer it if I sat down and read a book.”

In contradiction to this professed hyperactivity, Dornan has a languid delivery, with a crackly County Down lilt. His manner is composed, too. And he is open and self-deprecating, punctuating his conversation with an easy laugh. He even seems to wear his good looks lightly, behind a five-day beard. It’s sickening.

And it gets worse. With his spatchcocked chicken he orders a regular Coke. Really? Not diet? “Yeah, really.” He claims he doesn’t need to watch what he drinks and eats. Seems to stay in shape naturally. In fact he usually drinks beer, and opens a bottle of wine every night after helping his wife put their 11-month-old daughter to bed. And he eats “any old crap. I could eat 10 packs of Hula Hoops a day and not think about it.”
Dark star: in the second season of The Fall.
Dark star: in the second season of The Fall. Photograph: Helen Sloan/BBC/The Fall 2 Limited

Dornan also claims that he doesn’t need to spend hours each day in the gym (do we believe him?), and that he feels insecure about his appearance.

And at this point we need a little context. For almost a decade, you see, Jamie Dornan was one of the highest-paid male models in the world. Dubbed the “Golden Torso” by the New York Times, he was photographed by Bruce Weber and contracted to Dior, Armani and Calvin Klein; for one memorable billboard campaign, he and Kate Moss posed together wearing nothing but their tight Calvin Klein jeans.

Did he feel objectified when he was a model? “At times, yeah; on the whole, no. I got lucky with that gig because quite early on I could be picky about what I did, where I did it. And because I was on contracts, I was working maybe 10 days a year and getting paid really well for it.”

He says “working”. Actually what he had to do most of the time was “lean against a wall while looking depressed”.

When I ask him how old he was when he first realised, to quote Derek Zoolander, he was “really, really ridiculously good looking”, he gives an off-centre smile and a shake of his head. “I don’t recall. I’m not sure it has even happened yet. I didn’t do particularly well with girls at school. I was always very young- looking. And my sister’s friends would always say: ‘You’re so cute.’ I fucking hated that. If you are a skinny, baby-faced teenager, the last thing you want to hear is that you’re cute.”

His mental picture of himself as baby-faced is the reason he usually sports a beard. “I feel uncomfortable without it. I find myself moving differently. I don’t like myself without a beard.”

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OK, there’s one insecurity about his appearance. Any others? “My nose bends to the right.” It has been broken twice definitely, three times possibly – when his tennis coach “fired a fucking tennis ball in my face”, when a maul collapsed in rugby and when someone headbutted him in a Clapham pub.

Well, the camera doesn’t seem to mind the asymmetry. Nor does it have a problem with his beard, which we are about to see on our screens again when he resumes his Bafta-nominated role in the second series of The Fall. In this critically acclaimed drama – which has brought BBC2 its highest ratings in more than a decade – Dornan plays an eerily calm serial killer who stalks the streets of Belfast by night but who by day is a bereavement counsellor and loving father. And judging by the first episode of the new series, which sees his character return to Belfast after his escape to Scotland at the end of the first, it has lost none of its tension or darkness.

Part of its appeal, I suggest to him, is that the character he plays is chilling yet strangely sympathetic, because you see both sides of his life: the rapist and the family man. In a way it is his co-star Gillian Anderson, who plays the detective hunting him, who is the colder figure. “Yeah, you end up sort of gunning for my character in some sick way. You’re almost wanting him to get away with it. That’s what is so genius about the writing.”

Clearly he is proud of this drama. “I’ve always got The Fall,” he says as if to reassure himself. “No matter what happens in my career, I’ve always got The Fall.” And it has served him well, leading him to be cast in three Hollywood films due for release over the next couple of years – one in which he plays opposite Bradley Cooper, another in which he co-stars with Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and a third, well, let’s talk about that third.

In the film adaptation of the bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, Dornan plays the billionaire BDSM-enthusiast Christian Grey. The trailer was previewed online not long ago. It broke the record for the most hits: more than 100m in one week.

If it is this film he is alluding to when he says “whatever else happens in my career”, then that would be understandable, for it must be daunting having to live up to the expectations of 100 million readers. The only comparison in recent years is with Tom Hanks taking on the similarly popular Da Vinci Code – but he’s Tom Hanks; he can afford to take a gamble (and gamble it proved to be, because that film was a turkey). For Dornan, this is his first lead in a big-budget movie. And he was even told he had to shave his comfort beard off for the role.

“I am never going to please all 100 million people who read the book,” he says. “I’ll be lucky if half that number are happy with me playing Christian Grey. I know there are campaigns of hate against me already.”

It’s not paranoia – I checked online. And the critics are no doubt sharpening their knives as well. He rolls his grey snow-leopard eyes. “Yeah, there is a huge intellectual snobbery about the book. And it comes from all the papers that I like to read. The Guardian is my home page on my laptop, and the other day I logged on innocently and there they were having a massive go at the trailer for Fifty Shades and I was thinking: ‘Fuck, this is not good.’” He laughs. “But what can I do? I understand why those kinds of papers would have preconceived ideas about what it is.”
The ties that bind: with Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades of Grey.
The ties that bind: with Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades of Grey. Photograph: Allstar/Focus Features

That it is just “mummy porn”? That it lacks literary merit?

“Yeah, all of that – but you have to give Erika [EL James] some credit, because whatever you might think of the prose style, 100 million is a lot of people. Are the literary critics saying those 100 million people aren’t very bright?”

Yep, that’s about the strength of it.

He laughs again.

“OK. Fair enough.”

Had he read it before he landed the role?

He shakes his head.

Had his wife?

“Nope. Because we are the types of people who have the Guardian as our home page. Look, the film is not the book. It’s an adaptation, and Sam Taylor-Johnson is an artist as well as an award-winning film director. Look at her track record. And look at the film studios behind it. Universal. Focus. All I can say is, wait until you see it before passing judgment.”

We talk about the whole Fifty Shades phenomenon, why so many women seem to have sadomasochistic fantasies. As part of his research he went along to a BDSM dungeon in Vancouver, where he watched “a perfectly sweet and normal woman” enjoying being spanked. “There may well be a repressed side to some women who long for that kind of thrill in their everyday life,” he says with a shrug.

When asked how graphic the film is, he pauses, weighs his answer. “You want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible without grossing them out. You don’t want to make something gratuitous, and ugly, and graphic.”

So no sex then? “Sam is a very bright woman, so there might be some suggestive elements to it, but I haven’t seen it at this stage, so it is hard for me to say. I’m aware of what we shot, and it wasn’t as if we shot a film without any action.”

Was he completely in the nude? “There were contracts in place that said that viewers wouldn’t be seeing my, um…”

Todger? He laughs. “Yeah, my todger.”

Not like Ewan McGregor, then. He has it written into his contracts that his must be seen, at every possible opportunity. The laugh again. “Does he? Well, maybe Ewan has a more impressive girth.”

On a more serious point, Dornan describes himself as a feminist – is he worried that the film will glorify sexual violence against women? “I think it’s very hard to argue that when it is all consensual. Half the book is about making contracts. Permission and agreement that this be done. There’s no rape, no forced sexual situations.”

And no, he didn’t find it a turn-on when he had to spank co-star Dakota Johnson. “Anyone who thinks actors get turned on doing sex scenes in films is mistaken. There are dozens of hairy men standing around, moving cables and lighting equipment. That’s not sexy unless you’re into being watched, which I’m not.”
Family man: with his wife Amelia Warner.
Family guy: with his wife Amelia Warner. Photograph: Richard Kendal/Barcroft Media

Was his wife comfortable with him doing it? “She understands that it is work.” In fact she used to be an actor herself and the couple met through mutual friends in Hollywood. “I don’t think we will be watching it together too many times at home, though.”

Dakota Johnson has said she doesn’t want her parents to watch the film. “I don’t want Dakota’s parents watching it either!” he says.

He’s sure his father will be totally fine with it, but says: “I’m more concerned about my mates. More concerned about the ribbing I’ll get. We’re all quite harsh with each other, in a lovely, known-each-other-all-our-lives way.”

A lot of his friends from Northern Ireland now live in London, and none of them are actors. He insists that his glamorous life as a film star hasn’t had an impact on these friendships, that they still talk about ordinary things. That was one of the things he learned from his girlfriend of two years Keira Knightley: “There’s someone who still has great friends from her youth.”

Dornan is a hard man not to like. From a journalistic point of view, indeed, you almost wish he had some unpleasant personality flaw to balance things out. Rudeness to waiters, perhaps. But the going hasn’t been as smooth as it seems. Because casting agents thought of him as a model, he found it a struggle to break into acting, with hundreds of failed auditions. I ask what assumptions people made about him in his modelling days. “None, because I wouldn’t tell them I was a model. I’d always say I was an actor.” This said, he protests that he has “great respect” for the fashion industry. “But the fact that I lied about what I did proves that I mustn’t have been hugely comfortable with the label. I’m still haunted by the reaction my dad got when he told his friends what I did for a living.”

His father is a professor of medicine and one of Ireland’s leading obstetricians and gynaecologists. The life they led in Holywood, County Down, was decidedly “middle class”. Young Jamie attended school in Belfast, where he was more interested in rugby than academic work.

After his A levels were derailed by the death of his mother to cancer, he ended up going to Teesside University briefly, before dropping out to train as an actor and sing in a band, Sons of Jim. The band did quite well, appearing on television and supporting KT Tunstall on tour, but then his modelling career took off and everything else had to be put on hold.

I ask him about Belfast. It didn’t seem like a war zone to him when he was growing up. “There would be a bomb scare every Saturday, but that was about it.” Though he was raised a Protestant he never felt like one, and he says he has no time for the small minority who spoil it for the rest, with their “my Jesus is better than your Jesus stuff”.

When we discuss his mother’s death, he reveals a stoical side. “What can I say? It is an unimaginably horrible thing to happen to you when you are 16. I was at an impressionable age and was naive. I was angry at the start and I still get angry now sometimes. But my dad helped me get a perspective. My mum’s death made me more accepting of things, but the enormity of it still hits me in waves.”

With a lump in my throat, I say that it’s sad that his mother didn’t live long enough to see what became of her talented son.

“Well,” he says with a slow, knowing nod, “it’s probably just as well she didn’t have to see Fifty Shades.”

It’s difficult to imagine anyone more Tory than Charles Moore. He edited the Telegraph, opposes gay marriage and for the past 17 years has been writing Margaret Thatcher’s official biography. Nigel Farndale meets the man who’s been rifling through Maggie’s wardrobe

What can it be like being Charles Moore? Since 1997 he has been trying to get inside the head of Margaret Thatcher, understand her personality, fathom why she was so loved, so hated. That was the year she appointed him as her authorised biographer, and gave him unlimited access to everyone and everything in her life, on condition that he wouldn’t publish until after her death. So that’s a good 17 years of Thinking About Thatcher. Thatcher for breakfast. Thatcher for lunch. Thatcher over port in the evening.

Magnus Carlsen earns £1m a year and is mobbed by screaming fans wherever he goes. Why? Chess… and attitude. Nigel Farndale meets the 22-year-old Norwegian who next month aims to become world champion

Over the course of an hour, on a cloudless afternoon in Oslo, Magnus Carlsen sinks from an upright sitting position to an open-legged slouch, to an almost full stretch, as if on a psychiatrist’s couch. And that, I’m sure, is where his opponents would like to see him, preferably after he has unravelled mentally, in the manner of one-time chess world champion Bobby Fischer.

Carlsen jokes that he’s only 22, so there is “still plenty of time for the crazy”. But for now the crazy seems a long way away. And before then the young Norwegian is likely to become chess world champion himself, when he has his first shot at the title in November. In one of the most anticipated clashes since Fischer-Spassky in the 1970s and Karpov-Kasparov in the 80s and 90s, Carlsen will be taking on the 43-year-old five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand in India. Vishy, as he is known, has been in intense training for the match for three months. Carlsen has a much more relaxed approach. It is part of his genius.

You might think that an overused and ill-defined word, but no other will suffice. This genius is the reason Carlsen is known as “the Mozart of chess”. It’s not so much to do with his mercurial gifts – such as his ability to memorise thousands of games, or to beat 10 strong players simultaneously, blindfolded – but his style of play. He makes his moves more by intuition than analysis, feeling for them rather than thinking them through. And there is harmony in his moves – music, you might say.

Not surprisingly then, chess fans, too, might like to see Carlsen on the couch, or rather hear what he has to say and get inside that beautiful mind of his. For he is still an enigma, despite his very public rise from child prodigy to youngest world number one at 19 and finally, last year, becoming the highest-rated player in history.

I first met Carlsen when he was 13, at his grandparents’ house overlooking an inlet of sea, on the outskirts of Oslo. He had just become the world’s youngest grandmaster and had never done a newspaper interview before. He wasn’t shy and introverted quite, more… bored. His father, Henrik, an oil executive who was a keen though average chess player, filled in the gaps in our conversation and revealed that from an early age Magnus had been able to perform impressive feats of memory, reciting countries, populations and so on, but that it wasn’t until he was eight, when sibling rivalry drove him to beat his older sister at chess, that he really began to focus on the game. Back in 2004, young Magnus humoured me when I asked if I could play a game with him. It may not have been pretty, but at least it was over quickly, and he looked bored throughout. I have no intention of reminding him of that painful drubbing today.

The look of boredom is to do with his brooding features, a sulky mouth and a heavy, almost Neanderthal brow, which furrows when he concentrates. These looks, I should add, led to him being named one of “the sexiest men of 2013” by Cosmopolitan, and have earned him lucrative modelling contracts, appearing alongside the Hollywood actor Liv Tyler in advertising campaigns for the fashion brand G-Star. And they are combined with a slow-burn, lopsided smile that starts on one side of his mouth and creeps across his face like a shadow. He does that during matches, when he realises he has a checkmate in his sights. It must put the fear of God into his opponents.

I ask him if he ever feels sorry for them. “Not really,” he says in a low, measured voice, traceried with Norwegian. “But I find it more difficult to play opponents who I feel, for whatever reason, aren’t approaching the games with a sufficient level of seriousness. For instance, once at a big tournament I saw a player I was due to play the next day have a couple of drinks. Knowing that just ruined my concentration, because I thought how can I play seriously against someone who has drinks the day before?”

We describe him as a genius; does he think he is one? Carlsen sinks lower on the sofa. “No, I am not. I’m just really, really good at what I do. I’m fortunate to do something I love, but I’m not a genius.” How would he describe himself then? “I guess I’m pretty laid back.” As he says this he sinks lower still into the sofa, as if to illustrate what he means. Is it a pose? I don’t think so. The posture suits his personality, his languor. “But I am also determined when it comes to chess. I don’t like conflicts, apart from on the board. In general I am very different to how I am on the board.”

From the age of 13 he was a household name in Norway. Did he get picked on at school for that? “Not really. Some people I didn’t like, and they didn’t like me and would occasionally call me names, but it didn’t really bother me. I used to like provoking people and occasionally they would retaliate.” I ask him if his three sisters kept his feet on the ground, teased him. “Yes, they didn’t give me any special treatment.” His father told me that he could be stubborn. “Yes definitely, especially with my sisters, because they are also stubborn.”

An example of this stubbornness was his decision to forgo a university education. ‘My parents wanted me to go, but at some point I lost interest in formal education and they were OK with it. I wasn’t paying much attention so I wasn’t great at school.” That low boredom threshold again. Does he get bored easily? “Yes, in my later years at school I was bored, not necessarily because it was too easy, but because it didn’t interest me.”

Today Carlsen is wearing a grey blazer adorned with his sponsors’ logos, and the steel and glass building I meet him in is home to another of his sponsors, an investment bank. Unusually for a chess player he makes more than £1m a year in sponsorship, and he doesn’t seem to mind performing stunts as part of his contractual obligations, such as the blindfold simultaneous games. In fact, he seems to enjoy doing them and says he wants to take on 20 players next time. “When you think about chess all the time you are playing blindfolded anyway, sort of. But I can understand why other people find it freaky. One of the beauties of chess is that you don’t need a board either to play or analyse.”

Boards are rarely set up around his home, he adds, because he doesn’t need them to train. Nor does he rely on computers as much as other leading players. “I use them to analyse my openings, but in tournaments my assumption is that I am the best player there. That is why I seek positions where computer analysis can’t play that much of a role, or where I can analyse it better than a computer.” Not short of self-belief then.

Back in 1997 when Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer, beat Kasparov, it caused a sensation and there was much debate about man v machines. There is no longer a debate. The best machines can beat the best humans. Carlsen tells me he doesn’t play against them any more. “I never had any fun playing computers. It doesn’t bring me satisfaction to beat them and losing to them is always painful.”

Losing to Deep Blue disturbed Kasparov’s equilibrium, I note. Big time. “Yeah, but I think every loss damages Kasparov. He’s one of those people,” says Carlsen. “He didn’t think he was going to lose to Deep Blue, but towards the end of the match he was nervous and second guessing himself all the time, and I think basically he beat himself.”

Computers don’t suffer mental fatigue, of course. What about when Carlsen has been playing for seven hours at a stretch? Does he get headaches? “No, not really, but I do get tired. I can’t sit there for seven hours straight. I need to freshen my mind by going for a walk.”

Ah yes, the pacing, for which he is known. Is it gamesmanship? Chess, after all, lends itself to psychological warfare – Mikhail Tal’s infamous hypnotic stare, for example, or the kicks that Petrosian administered under the table to his rival Korchnoi. “No, the pacing is to let my mind wander before getting back to the game with a fresh perspective.”

There are more possible games in chess than there are atoms in the solar system — and even to try to think about that statistic makes you dizzy. Yet grandmasters welcome such intellectual vertigo and refer to being in “the tank”, a place where they can enjoy losing themselves, their sense of time, as they swim around with ideas. Even so, when he considers a move for a long time, for an hour, say, running variations round and round in his head, does he ever feel like he’s being driven mad?

“A little, maybe. But if I study a position for an hour then I am usually going in loops and I’m probably not going to come up with something useful. I usually know what I am going to do after 10 seconds; the rest is double checking.” He calls this process verifying his intuition. “Often I cannot explain a certain move, only know that it feels right, and it seems that my intuition is right more often than not.”

there are parallels between Carlsen and Bobby Fischer, the only other “western” chess world number one. Both made their name at a tender age with an audacious queen sacrifice, both had their childhoods distorted by fame and both are fanatical about physical fitness. Carlsen is a member of the gym in his new apartment complex; he is also a keen skier and football player. “I’ve recently started playing for a team here in Oslo. I play at left back where I can do least damage.”

And yet I’ve heard that, when not exercising, he is quite lazy. Is that fair? “Yes, I am quite lazy, I like to sleep in until noon. Most of my friends have jobs.” He does “a bit of yoga”, although he adds: “So far I haven’t thought of any brilliant chess moves while lying down.”

Does he dream about chess in his sleep? A long sigh. “Occasionally, but these dreams are usually connected with something negative. I am losing to players I never normally lose to and I am arriving late and being defaulted; that happens so many times in my dreams – I don’t know why.”

Fischer was single for most of his troubled life. Carlsen doesn’t have a girlfriend at the moment. “I haven’t had too much time to develop any serious relationships, recently anyway. I’m hoping after the world championships I will be able to change that.”

I imagine a girlfriend will have to be at least knowledgeable about chess. “Yeah. Probably. But it’s also nice to…” He trails off. “I really don’t like it when I go out and some girls start talking to me about how they played chess with their grandfather as a kid, I can’t stand that. It’s boring. I want to talk about whatever else.”

I ask about his emotional landscape: does he cry? “I was really upset yesterday when I tried to install my new TV and there was no sound. But that was more frustration. Cry? I don’t really. I get angry, but mostly about chess.”

I suppose the issue I am circling around is the one he jokes about, “the crazy”. Is he protective of his mental health, worried about losing his mind in the way Fischer did? “It was probably only the chess keeping him sane. He would have gone insane much quicker without it. His story is very different to mine. He had a difficult upbringing. Difficult relationship to his family. I have lived a much more sheltered, normal life. As normal as it could be, considering how much I travelled.”

Shortly before he became a grandmaster at 13 (Fischer became one at 15, Kasparov at 17) Carlsen’s parents sold their car, rented out their house and took him and his sisters out of school to explore the world for a year. Their travels took them to Reykjavik, Iceland, scene of the epic Cold War-by-proxy Fischer-Spassky match – and it was here that Magnus himself took a leap into legend when he found himself playing the great Kasparov. They drew, but not before the young Magnus had got bored and wandered off. Kasparov was rattled but has since become Carlsen’s champion, even working as his coach for a while. He has said, indeed, that such will be Carlsen’s dominance of the game for the next couple of decades, it will be known as “the Carlsen era”.

In August, Carlsen was out in Chennai, India, doing a recce, and was greeted by 2,000 cheering fans, mostly female. One reason for the trip was to try the food in the hotel where the tournament will be held, to check it wouldn’t make him sick. Still, he’s planning to bring a Norwegian cook along anyway.

“I generally try to eat healthily, avoid quick carbs that make your blood sugar go up and down, which is bad for concentration.” He eats one and a half hours before a game, and tries to sleep until as close to the start of the game as possible, “because my mind works best four or five hours after I wake up”.

In the nearby harbour a foghorn sounds. Carlsen’s manager enters and says our photographer is ready. As we head up to the roof terrace, he asks me if I play chess. Before I can answer, Carlsen says: “Yes, I played him when I was 13.” He has remembered. Of course he has. He then vaults athletically over the railings. A grandmaster, yes. A typical one, no.

‘Women didn’t like me when I was a sex symbol’

What can it be like being Greta Scacchi? In the Eighties and early Nineties she enjoyed – if enjoyed is the right word – huge fame as a film star, winning awards and critical acclaim, but she never seemed comfortable with her image as a sex symbol – one who didn’t seem to mind taking her clothes off on screen – and in due course she turned her back on Hollywood in order to be taken more seriously as a stage actress.

In her private life, meanwhile, she seemed to go from one controversy to another, which is why she doesn’t like to talk about “that stuff” in interviews. But today she is finding her personal life a hard subject to avoid because she is in the middle of rehearsals for Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, and, well, let her explain…

“The play resonates with me personally because it’s about the predicament of a single working mother with two children. When it was written [in 1944] that was a rare thing. Single mothers would be ostracised. Amanda, the character I play, is fearful that her children will repeat the destructive patterns of…” She checks herself. “Having children growing up who remind her of the absent father…”

Scacchi with her partner Carlo Mantegazza
Scacchi with her partner Carlo Mantegazza

She has seen where this is going. That “her” could equally be a “me”. Scacchi was three when her father, an Italian art dealer, walked out on her mother, an English dancer. And Scacchi’s daughter was six months old when her father, the American actor Vincent D’Onofrio, deserted her. It was a painful episode in her life and she more or less became a recluse for four years afterwards. She subsequently had another child, a son, with her first cousin, Carlo Mantegazza, which caused much media excitement and, though it was perfectly legal, was disapproved of by her family. Her personal life is complicated. And it is understandable that she doesn’t like to “go there”.

Scacchi has a way of smiling while she is talking that is almost as disconcerting as the way she directs her cold blue stare at you. Trying to ignore both, I move on to safer ground, and note how often parents wait for their children to grow up before getting a divorce. But then it happens again: “I know, I know,” she says. “I remember when… No, I’m not going to tell you about my personal stuff. The question is this: is a 19-year-old more resilient to the divorce of his parents than a 10-year-old? I don’t think you can make up rules, because whatever you do you’re going to f— things up.”

Femme fatale: Scacchi made her name in White Mischief
Femme fatale: Scacchi made her name in White Mischief

There is another parallel between the play and Scacchi’s life I want to explore. Amanda, the faded Southern belle she plays, has a complicated relationship with her children, even coming to resent them. Scacchi’s relationship with her children has not been complication-free either. Her daughter changed her surname when her school friends started Googling it and found themselves directed towards websites specialising in clips of celebrities in the nude.

What advice does she give her daughter? “I’ve given up! I don’t give advice.”

Really? “Actually she’s 23 now and much more interested in what I have to say to her. Much more respectful. I learnt that there is this maternal urge – love is too broad and overused a word, it is more a genuine care and concern – but it expresses itself in a clumsy and sometimes hurtful way. I remember through my daughter’s teenage years having so much I wanted to say and knowing that I had to bite my tongue and wait.”

When I ask what advice she would give her 23-year-old self, if she could meet her, there is a long pause. “Don’t know…” Another dramatic pause. “Don’t know.”

Scacchi in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust
Scacchi in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust

In 1983, at the age of 23, Scacchi shot to fame when she played a sultry femme fatale in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust. After that came other sultry femme fatale roles, notably in White Mischief (1987).

So what about her film career? Any advice for her younger self there? “I would say don’t spend so much energy worrying about being typecast. If there is a hook, run with it. Then once you have gathered experience playing the femme fatale, you can use it as a platform for other things. I was so self-conscious about it, I kept turning down films which repeated that male fantasy thing.”

Are we talking about Basic Instinct here, a role she rejected? “That was very much to do with that. There was no way I could have coped with playing that role [which went to Sharon Stone]. I didn’t like the script and didn’t want to play a character who was essentially a male heterosexual’s lesbian fantasy. I thought that offensive.”

So no regrets when it became a blockbuster? “No, funnily enough.”

Although she says she wanted to do European art films instead, and had no interest in doing “commercial Hollywood stuff”, she did co-star with Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent (1990), and succumbed to the usual demands from the director that she get her kit off. How did she find working with a star of his stature? “He was quite shy, actually. All crooked grins and one-word answers.”

After that she landed a part opposite Tim Robbins in Robert Altman’s Oscar-nominated The Player. The director told her to “take your knickers off and do what you’re paid to do” but this time she refused and won. Did she feel bullied by male directors? “Some of them were bullies. You are very much at their mercy.”

I imagine her background was quite liberal and bohemian. Presumably she was relaxed about nudity? “Yeah, I didn’t have a hang-up about nudity. I felt like I learnt a lot about different cultures in the way some of my work was responded to: the French, as long as my lipstick was perfect, were very relaxed about my nudity, the Italians would give you a standing ovation every time you flashed something, but the British were very uptight. They found the nudity titillating.”

Years of intermittent work, mostly on stage and television, followed her rejection of Hollywood, and then, in 2013, she finally fulfilled an ambition to do Shakespeare, when Jonathan Miller cast her as Regan in King Lear at the Old Vic.

Scacchi in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie
Scacchi, centre, in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie

To her great credit, Scacchi more or less looks her age, which is 55. Unlike other film stars of her generation, she has eschewed plastic surgery and often, as today, she faces the world without make-up. She seems comfortable in her own skin, then, and tells me she has no superstitions and doesn’t suffer stage fright.

But I don’t get the impression that the fame of her youth brought her much happiness. She certainly didn’t enjoy being a sexual fantasy figure to men. “I found it strange. But now I’m older it can be helpful. Women go into that paranoid phase where they feel invisible. People are not normally going to imagine a 55-year-old woman without her clothes on, but with me they project, they’ve got a certain memory, I suppose.” She covers her face in mock horror. “I don’t know why I said that! Lets not talk about this stuff.”

Scacchi, who speaks four languages fluently, describes herself as restless, independent and a feminist who found it insulting to be defined by her good looks when she was a young actor. “I consider myself to be an analytical person and so have always found it uninteresting to worry about my appearance. Probably I should worry about it more.”

She has no interest in writing a memoir, either, “though some of the stories I could tell you about Hollywood you would find horrifying”. I get the impression that one of the reasons she enjoys being herself more now than “then” is that women like her more.

This comes up when I ask how “the sisterhood” reacted to her in the days when magazines routinely described her as one of the most beautiful women in the world. Did she inspire envy?

“I’m enjoying these later years much more now that that thing has subsided. I think it was there [the envy]. There was a point when I could have done with more support from women. There was a phase when I thought, women don’t like me.” She rocks back in her chair. “But let’s not talk about this. Let’s get back to the play.”

As the songwriter’s work is reimagined in a new London show, he talks to Nigel Farndale about the price of fame

Before I meet Burt Bacharach at his hotel in London, I sit in on rehearsals for a new show of his music, a montage arranged and performed by Kyle Riabko, a 27-year-old Canadian. Because Bacharach, who is 87, had so many hits – 70 in the States, 50 here, usually with lyrics by the late Hal David – the show can’t include them all, not in an hour and a half.

But The Look of Love features in the show along with (They Long to Be) Close to You, I’ll Never Fall in Love Again, Do You Know the Way to San Jose and What the World Needs Now is Love. And just when I feel my heart can’t take any more, Riabko puts down his electric guitar, picks up a ukulele and plays Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.

He is sitting with me now as we wait for Bacharach to arrive, explaining, in quite technical terms, why these songs are “so damn good”: it’s to do with the shifting time signatures and irregular phrasing, apparently. “The best way to explain it is in terms of geometry,” he says. “He creates lots of musical shapes but never ends up with a square.”

As well as being the latest of more than 1,000 recording artists to have interpreted the Burt Bacharach songbook – including Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick – Kyle Riabko is also a fan, but one with a difference: Bacharach is a fan of his.

The two became friends, despite the age gap, after meeting in an LA studio three years ago. The younger man then sent the older some demos on which he had breathed new life into the songbook — and Bacharach said it was “like receiving a love letter”.

He invited Riabko to his house in Santa Monica to play the demos to his youngest children, Oliver and Raleigh (now 22 and 19) and the demos evolved into What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined, which became a hit revue in New York. As well as Riabko, it features half a dozen other young singers and musicians and is directed by Steven Hoggett, the Olivier-winning choreographer. It is now transferring to London’s Menier Chocolate Factory.

Bacharach arrives with his manager, who promptly expresses concern about how cold the room is. She rearranges the chairs so that Bacharach, who is wearing a padded outdoor jacket, doesn’t have to sit near the air conditioner, then she leaves us.

“I was on stage last night at the Hampton Court Festival,” Bacharach says in a voice that sounds like bourbon poured over gravel, “and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so cold in my life. At one point I put a cough drop in my mouth, just before singing Hey little girl, and I tried to chew it as quickly as I could, but didn’t finish it in time for my next song and started coughing into the mic instead. I tried to get it out and then my fingers made the keyboard sticky.”

An endearingly self-deprecating anecdote, one that emboldens me to ask if he has ever heard one of his songs being played as background music in a lift? “Look, it’s a high compliment to hear your music played anywhere. I remember once Jane and I were having dinner in Italy and the pianist was playing That’s What Friends Are For, and there is a tricky chord change and he didn’t have it. A little later I went over and said, ‘Can I show you what that chord is?’ In a nice way, like it was a gift from me to him.”

We talk about how each generation of pop stars seems to discover the Burt Bacharach songbook for themselves and want to interpret it, from the Stranglers and the White Stripes to Elvis Costello and Dr Dre — and, of course, Noel Gallagher, who became obsessed with Bacharach.

What does he think is behind this cross-generational timelessness? “It’s a curious thing,” he says. “There was a time when you heard Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, very attractive songs, but three months later their music was gone. I think what gives my songs longevity is they have some meat to them, some depth.”

When pressed on what he means by this, he says one explanation might be Hal David’s lyrics. The two had a falling-out over royalties and didn’t speak for 10 years except through their lawyers, but they eventually patched things up.

“I will take the count for that one – my fault,” Bacharach said at the time of David’s death at the age of 91 in 2012. The lyrics often came first, he explains, and they tended to have difficult internal rhythms, such as What’s It All About, Alfie? They would force Bacharach to be creative in the way he accommodated them, using what Frank Sinatra called Bacharach’s “hat size” phrasing. “Alfie would never have been written without Hal’s lyrics coming first,” Bacharach says, “because it became a 10-bar phrase rather than eight. Or take Raindrops, that was from scoring Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They were dummy lyrics from Hal, a real mouthful, and he kept trying to change them, but he couldn’t come up with anything better.”

Just as well he didn’t as that song was not only a No 1 around the world, but also won them an Oscar.

“I have no rules apart from one,” Bacharach says. “Don’t make it difficult for the listener.” Just the singer. “Yeah, there were a few complaints,” he says with a chuckle. Complaints? There is a clip of Cilla Black recording Alfie at the Abbey Road Studios in 1965 and she looks like she is being tortured. He chuckles again. “Yeah, I made her do about 32 takes, then George Martin said to me, ‘I think we had it on take four, Burt’.”

His melodies are always tender, but also often melancholic. Has he ever moved himself to tears when writing one? “I can get emotional. I sometimes have to get away from the piano and go and lie down on the couch.”

But he says he rarely thought of the women he was in love with when he was writing. “There may have been some subconscious stuff going on, but it was more a matter of solving musical problems.”

His autobiography in 2013 revealed a layer of darkness, showing he could be not only crass and sexist but also as insensitive in his daily life as he was sensitive in his songs. So I ask him if he is difficult to live with. “Yeah, difficult to live with because of the hours I keep. But nowadays I try to go to bed at a quarter-to-ten. And I try to conform to dinner hours that work for the kids.”

Known as a prodigious womaniser – his nickname in the Manhattan of the Sixties was the Playboy of the Western World – Bacharach nevertheless managed to commit to marriage on four occasions. If he met his 16-year-old self and told him that’s what would happen, would he be surprised? “Well I don’t know about my 16-year-old self, but I know that I’m surprised. I thought I was a good kid, and I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but when you wind up being married four times, there are a lot of bodies strewn in your wake.”

When I ask what advice he would give his 22-year-old son Oliver, his answer speaks volumes about the self-absorption/selfishness that can go with creativity. “My advice? If it’s not working then get out. Whatever it costs, and however much emotional damage it might cause, you have to get out, because you only have one life.”

And for his daughter Raleigh? “Don’t get knocked up in college.”

He is back on friendly terms with his second wife, the actress Angie Dickinson. “I called Angie on the way to the airport to see how she is, and I take her out to dinner about three times a year.” The two have a painful bond: a daughter who was on the autistic spectrum and who killed herself in a fit of depression at 40. “It was hard losing Nikki for both of us, but especially for Angie, because they were very, very close.”

Despite an even more bitter divorce, he is also now friends again with Carole Bayer Sager, his third wife, who wrote the lyrics for his 1981 song Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do), another No 1 and Oscar winner.

“And we share a son, but hey,” he says, shrugging, “you shouldn’t hold on to the past too much, even the good stuff.”

There’s an impostor in Sir Trevor McDonald’s office at the ITN studios on the Gray’s Inn Road. With his big square specs, short wiry mat of silver hair and slow-breaking, granite smile, he certainly looks like Sir Trevor. But this stranger lacks the calm authority of the newscaster who has presented News at Ten – with one notable hiatus – since 1990. He stammers over certain words, he avoids eye contact, he claims to be a shy, cautious and insecure man who is uneasy about being cast as a national institution. ‘All I do is read the bloody news,’ he says, tapping a pen against his fingers. ‘I know it’s a proper job but, really, people do make too much of it.’ He looks away. ‘I’ve always felt ambivalent about being recognised just for appearing on television. What I see in the mirror is different, I think, to how viewers see me. I don’t identify with that person. I’m not comfortable watching myself. Not my idea of fun.’
In some ways, the insecurity and self-effacement is perverse, because this man has always seemed to play the role of Trevor McDonald so magnificently – avuncular, poetry-quoting, cricket-loving Trinidadian; clubbable bon viveur who drinks good champagne, smokes fine cigars and addresses colleagues as ‘dear boy’. In other respects, Sir Trevor may be right to feel like an impostor. He is a gentle man at the top of a profession which is in thrall to aggressive men (Jeremy Paxman, John Humphrys). And the top is surely where he is: he’s been named Newscaster of the Year three times; he is, surveys consistently show, the newscaster most viewers recognise; and even a spokesman for the BBC, the arch-enemy, grudgingly admitted to me that Sir Trevor is probably the nation’s favourite newsreader (as well as the most highly paid, having reportedly signed a £2.5-million four-year deal with ITN). His own views on his combative profession are quaint, a reminder that, although he is only 61, he is very much a product of the pre-War school of journalism. ‘We are sometimes too aggressive,’ he says of television interviewers. ‘Politicians don’t get a chance to explain policy properly.’
He sits back in his chair, legs apart, his suit trousers riding up to reveal socks pulled well over his calves. ‘We assume we already know what the policy is and go straight into the attack.’ Although the shelves in his office bulge with volumes of poetry – ‘I wrote poetry as a child but I would never visit the crime of my own poetry on anyone now’ – the personal touches are limited to a novelty wine bottle on his desk (labelled ‘Old Git’); a couple of photographs of his handsome 13-year-old son, Jack, smiling in his school uniform; and, framed and hung on the wall, pictures of Sir Trevor in various guises: as chairman of the Better English Campaign; as a guest on Parkinson; as the subject of a poster celebrating the 30th anniversary of News at Ten. Scrawled on a yellow Post-It note stuck to his computer screen are last night’s viewing figures: ITV’s News at Ten, 6.1 million; BBC Ten O’clock News, 4.6 million.
There is weighty symbolism in this flimsy piece of paper. In March 1999 ITV axed News at Ten to make way for more films and drama. It certainly provoked drama. The channel lost a million viewers and, after much lobbying by politicians on both sides, as well as the threat of action by the Independent Television Commission, in January this year ITV was forced to restore News at Ten to its proper home. By which time, of course, the BBC had scheduled its Nine O’clock News an hour later. In the six months since they went head-to-head, the combined evening news audience for the two channels has – to the great surprise of media commentators – increased by two million.  But there is still ill will. ITN accuses the BBC of patronising its audience, and of being austere. The BBC, meanwhile, accuses News at Ten of dumbing down. Although Trevor McDonald no longer does the ‘And finally’ stories about, for instance, the rabbit who prevented burglars from raiding a pet shop, he does go in for rather a lot of matey, two-way interviews with reporters, which have become known in the industry as ‘Well, Trevors’. Trevor McDonald will cock his head slightly to the left and say, ‘Tell me, Julian. What is the situation in Baghdad?’ and Julian will answer, ‘Well, Trevor’ Trevor will then end with something along the lines of, ‘You take care now, Julian.’
The BBC has also accused ITV of dirty tactics in allowing the popular Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to overrun to 10.05pm, so that viewers miss the start of the BBC news and stick with ITV (except on Fridays, when News at Ten starts at 11pm). Its critics also point out that News at When? is usually on only three nights a week, and then for only around 17 minutes (compared to the BBC’s 32 minutes, five times a week). Alluding to the programme’s lightweight reputation, Rory Bremner has taken to calling it I Feel Like News at Ten Tonite. Trevor McDonald is too tactful to say that he finds the truncated version of the programme frustrating. ‘It’s not what it was, but I do think we are fortunate to have it back at ten o’clock. And it has been extended for the election coverage – for what it is worth, because I do think you can swamp people with too much politics. But we must remember, ITV is a commercial company. Would I like to do a longer programme? Of course I would. But I’m pretty chipper about the way things are going and I predict we will get more time. I appreciate the News at When? joke – a couple of months ago we were all over the place. But the shake-out is still going on: they know you can’t build up an audience having it one night here and one night there.’
Sir Trevor’s appeal as a newscaster is obvious: if we have to listen to bad news, it is somehow easier to accept it coming from him. He makes us feel a little safer in a volatile world. It’s to do with his kind face, his neutrality, and a voice as reassuringly familiar as the chimes of Big Ben. To what does he attribute his popularity? ‘Oh dear. I hate answering questions like this. I think it’s to do with believability. But if a young presenter asked me how he or she could become more believable to an audience I wouldn’t have a clue what to say. I’m glad people do think of me as believable, though, because there is a mortgage hanging on it.’ Trevor McDonald learnt his trade – and refined his spoken English – by sitting at home in Trinidad listening to the BBC World Service. He would imitate the precise delivery of Richard Dimbleby and the mellifluous cadences of John Arlott. He is hopelessly sentimental about the days of Empire, of notions of fair play and paternalism.
For this reason, he is as critical of politicians who try to intimidate broadcasters as he is of aggressive journalists. He recalls overhearing a telephone conversation in which Michael Heseltine attempted to bully the ITN news editor into withdrawing an item unfavourable to the Tory party. The editor stood his ground. ‘I felt proud of him for that. It tends to be the editors rather than the presenters who have to deal with that side of things.’ He smiles slowly. ‘Sadly, I’m out of the magic circle. I wasn’t even bullied by Peter Mandelson last time round! And I tend not to socialise with politicians, in order to remain neutral.’ Really? In 1996 Trevor McDonald was reproached by the Independent Television Commission for being too friendly – the Labour Party preferred the word ‘fawning’ – in an interview with John Major held in the sunlit garden of Number 10. ‘John and I were cricketing buddies long before he was Prime Minister,’ he explains with a sigh. ‘We argued more about the merits of the West Indies and England sides than about politics. It was a soft interview that was meant to run at the end of the programme, but for reasons beyond my control, it was put in at the beginning. It didn’t deserve that editorial prominence.’ Civil fellow that he is, Sir Trevor adds that he is not trying to blame anyone, it was just one of those quick judgement calls you have to make in a newsroom. It does still seem to rankle, though. His credibility as a journalist was compromised by it, and being credible is something he has fought hard for over the years.
He began his career on radio and television in Trinidad. His first boss there, Ken Gordon, a leading figure in the Caribbean media, described the young Trevor as ‘an uncomplaining, dependable team player who spoke in a clipped English accent despite never having been to the United Kingdom’. In 1970, to his great satisfaction, he was hired, aged 30, by the BBC World Service and came to work in London. He moved to ITN in 1973 and, aware that he was the station’s first black reporter, made it a condition of his employment that he was not to be ‘sent to Brixton to do token black stories’. Since then he has been a Northern Ireland correspondent, sports commentator and diplomatic editor. His scoops include the first interview with Nelson Mandela after he was released from prison, an interview with Saddam Hussein shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and a memorable profile of Colonel Gaddafi, in which he spent days chasing across the desert, trying to keep up with the erratic Libyan leader. While on assignment in Uganda, he was caught filming in the wrong place at the wrong time and was bundled off to prison by a posse of policemen. A passer-by, unaware of his predicament, stopped the car to ask whether he could have the broadcaster’s autograph. ‘I was happy to oblige in exchange for a promise that my admirer would kindly call my producer back at the hotel and alert the British High Commission in Kampala that I would not be back for cocktails.’ The anecdote is pure Evelyn Waugh.
It is mid-afternoon, and Sir Trevor is between meetings about the running order for tonight’s programme. He seems more relaxed and gossipy now, leaning forward and asking questions in a hushed voice about my newspaper colleagues (he writes a weekly poetry column for The Daily Telegraph), and going off on tangents about cricket. (He bowls offbreaks but doesn’t play as much as he would like to: ‘Cricket lasts a long time, and it is not conducive to domestic peace to go off on Sunday mornings with the ITN team.’) He lives in Richmond with his second wife, Josephine, a former production assistant at ITN, and their son, Jack. The couple married in 1986, after Sir Trevor divorced his first wife, Beryl, to whom he had been married for 20 years, and with whom he has two children, Tim and Jo, both now grown-up. He thinks his children from his first marriage suffered from the fact that he was always at work, ‘trying to find a place in an extremely competitive world’. He is endeavouring to make it up with his third child and always attends school events.
The eldest of three, Trevor McDonald had no such problems with his own parents, Lawson and Geraldine. His father was a self-taught engineer from Grenada who moved to Trinidad to work on an oil refinery. He supplemented his income by raising pigs and mending shoes. The family lived in a small house with cracks in the walls that were covered with newspaper. ‘We were peasant folk, really, no one did anything of note. I had the finest parents in the world, though. I had a jammy ride. We were all great mates. My wife never believes this because so few families are like that. But I do think without my parents’ influence we would have done very little [his brother, who lives in Canada, works in radio, and his sister is a lawyer in Trinidad]. I frequently wonder how much of my career is down to me and how much is down to them.’
At Naparima College, a state school, Trevor McDonald’s nickname was Big Eyes. ‘I was boring and stuffy,’ he recalls. ‘I tended to be bookish and serious.’ He would go to watch cricket matches but then lie down in the long grass on the boundary, burying his head in Dickens, Thackeray or Hazlitt. His mother would recite poetry at meal times. ‘I never had formal voice coaching,’ he recalls, ‘but my mother was a stickler for proper speech. It was all right for my parents to be sloppy, of course, but not their children! My mother had a very Christian view of life. Never speak ill of anyone, if you can’t say anything good about someone, say nothing.’ Although he doesn’t share his parents’ religious zeal, he does think some of their values have remained with him. ‘My morals are as bad as the next person’s, but I do think one should try to have standards in life. One should try to be kind, good and gracious. I tend to be strict with my own children. I’m much more authoritarian than my wife. I think children should work at school. I hope Jack enjoys school, too, but he is not going there just for enjoyment.’ The young Trevor McDonald would be reprimanded by his parents if he didn’t greet his neighbours cheerfully in the street. ‘I had a positive outlook and I don’t think it was just because of the sunshine. In the West Indies people did look out for each other. It sounds almost utopian to talk of it now, but there was a great sense of community. No one was turned away for lunch. There was always enough to go round, and it was a sort of expanded family system.’
How is he regarded there today? ‘News of what one does gets across there pretty quickly and is exaggerated wildly. They have absorbed that North American attitude towards success stories, they love them. People say, “I knew him! I used to see him on the way to school!”‘ Lawson McDonald, he adds, could be rather boastful on the subject of Trevor McDonald, television star. ‘When I went back home, he would stand on the verandah of our house with a glass of the duty-free whisky I had just come off the plane with, and he would signal to passers-by to come in and meet me. I would be horrified by this, terribly embarrassed, and I wish I could have been more gracious. I wish I had found a way of conquering my embarrassment for his sake.’
He thinks that his ancestors were given the surname McDonald by a Scottish plantation owner. ‘My children often get bored by my telling them about their ancestors in the Caribbean,’ he says. In his novel The Enigma of Arrival Sir Trevor’s fellow émigré and knight VS Naipaul wrote that his knowledge of England derived from childhood reading: ‘I had come to London as to a place I knew very well. I found a city that was strange and unknown…’ Trevor McDonald’s experience seems to have been similar, and his obvious affection for English traditions has led some in Britain’s Afro-Caribbean community to dub him ‘Uncle Tom’. When he accepted a knighthood two years ago (he had already been appointed OBE in 1992), his evolution as an establishment flunkey seemed complete. Plenty of broadcasters and journalists have accepted titles in the past – Sir Robin Day, Sir David Frost, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne – but unfortunately for Sir Trevor, he accepted his honour at the same time as the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow turned his down. ‘I was totally shocked when I was offered the knighthood,’ Sir Trevor recalls. ‘In fact, I was convinced it was a hoax and went two days without telling a soul. I had sympathy with the view that journalists shouldn’t accept honours. If you heard that the government in, say, Uganda had made a senior journalist Grand Order of Uganda you would be suspicious. So why did I accept it? Well, I thought, “This is a great honour for the West Indian community in this country.” I’m not pretending that I didn’t feel proud, too. I called my sister and told her my dilemma. She said, “Don’t even hesitate. You have to accept it.” I convinced myself – and I don’t need to convince Jon Snow – that this has not compromised my journalistic integrity. My great regret was that my father wasn’t around to see me receive it. He would have thought, “Wow, a son of mine has been given a knighthood in England.” I thought of this and said to myself, “Dammit, I’m going to accept it. It is a big leg-up for all those immigrant families who have made the transition. I get letters from people who say, for instance, “I hadn’t thought of a career in journalism until I heard of you.”‘
But if Sir Trevor has become something of a role model for Britain’s black population, he has resisted attempts to cast him as a spokesman on racial issues. ‘When I’m asked to do overtly political things, I have to decline. But I am approached to do talks at a lot of multi-ethnic schools and I usually accept. I remember when two lawyers came back to our school to give a talk, it made a very powerful impression on me. I can see them now. They wore glasses.’ When Trevor McDonald first tasted fame, Lenny Henry included him as a character in his comedy routine: Trevor McDoughnut. Later, Rory Bremner blacked up to impersonate him (Bremner still features McDonald in his routines but no longer feels the need to wear make-up). Gerald Kaufman once said, ‘McDonald’s supreme achievement is that, while everyone of course knows that is he is black, nobody notices the colour of his skin.’ I ask Sir Trevor what he makes of this. ‘I couldn’t have determined that public perception, but it does correspond to my own experience of the world. There are racial problems in the West Indies, but I don’t remember anyone’s colour ever being discussed aggressively in my house. Race simply didn’t matter.’
So when he came to this cold wet island two years after Enoch Powell made his speech about ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’, and at a time when flagrantly racist sitcoms were aired at prime time, didn’t he think he had arrived in a racist country? ‘At first I was surprised that it was made so much of. I could see there were tensions about race, but it took a while for me to understand the politics behind them. I remember before I left Trinidad meeting up with a friend from primary school who said he was going to London; I asked him how he had managed that, and he said, “They sent for me. I’m going to be a bus driver.” I’ve always felt differences over colour are terribly exaggerated. But then I’ve been lucky.’ Pause. ‘Actually, I have become much more aware of my colour lately. It’s probably because of the current debates on race and ethnicity. I think politicians have to be very careful about what they say on the subject of immigration and asylum seekers, as they might appeal to baser instincts which have no place in a progressive, civilised society.’
Stories about racism and brutality – such as the genocide in Rwanda – depress Sir Trevor profoundly. He cries easily over news stories that feature children of his son’s age, and he found it almost impossible to watch the news coverage of the Stephen Lawrence case. ‘Seeing the pain of his parents on television was almost too much to bear. But we have made great strides and, for better or worse, this society is now multi-racial. I think the people who have come here have done a great deal to enrich British society.’
What does he make of Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’? He smiles. ‘I always cheer for the West Indies. But I have followed English cricket for so long, and I know people like Ian Botham, David Gower and Graham Gooch so well, I really glory in England’s success, too.’ Such an ugly question didn’t deserve such a dignified answer. But it seems typical of the man. He once walked out of Noel Edmond’s House Party in disgust when asked to read out a series of messages in regional slang. ‘I don’t do this kind of thing,’ he said. ‘I’m not a comedian.’ But he is good-humoured, in a guileless way. He is, moreover, an avoider of confrontation. ‘I’d never complain in a restaurant. Wouldn’t demand a refund; I find it undignified. I tend to bottle up anger. I think perhaps sometimes I can be a little too equable.’ He always needs to feel that he is in control of his emotions, he adds, which is why he has always steered clear of drugs. ‘Someone offered me a line of coke in America once, and I asked him what it would do. I was told it would keep me awake. Well that, I thought, is the last thing I need.’ He doesn’t always sleep well, it seems, and has occasional anxiety dreams that the bongs are beginning on News at Ten and he’s stuck in the back of a taxi, clawing at the seats.
It won’t be long now before the bongs are sounding for tonight’s programme. So – or should that be ‘And finally’ – what about that ‘tache? Is it just my imagination, or is it getting smaller? Sir Trevor grins and puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘I have taken to clipping it myself lately. This leads to battles with my hairdresser who says any clipping that needs to be done should be done by him.’ Tap papers on desk. Tilt head to one side. Goodnight.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there lived a handsome young prince who wasn’t really a prince at all and, subjective though these things are, wasn’t really that young or handsome either. His people called him young and handsome because there existed in his country an ancient custom called ‘toadying shamelessly’. And they called him a prince because the heels of his shoes were encrusted with diamonds, his wardrobes contained 3,000 designer suits, his toothbrush was made of gold…
Fairytale is the only genre for the life and times of Dr Moosa Bin Shamsher, or Prince Moosa, as he is unofficially known; fairytale with a dark twist. For Dr Moosa, probably one of the richest men on the subcontinent, lives in one of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh. And he has made his one (or two) billion pounds (or dollars) mostly from trading in tanks, fighter planes, ICBMs – things that cause, as the euphemism goes, ‘significant collateral damage’.
Our story begins more than a year ago, when Dr Moosa approached The Telegraph through a Birmingham-based Irish intermediary who, in unilateral recognition of the knighthood bestowed upon him by the Catholic Order of St John, prefixes his name with the title ‘Sir’. Would we, asked the Irish knight, be interested in an interview with a Bangladeshi prince who in 1994 offered Tony Blair £5 million to help him win the general election (it was declined); who, in 1996, loaned his Gulfstream jet to Bob Dole to help him fight his (unsuccessful) campaign for the United States presidency; who was on such chummy terms with Boris Yeltsin that they chat regularly on the phone and send each other gifts? Rather.
A visit arranged for last spring was postponed because Dr Moosa’s 20-year-old daughter Nancy was marrying the first cousin of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. The arrangements included covering Nancy – from head to foot, while lying down – in a dowry of gold and jewels. Dr Moosa’s private jet flew in flowers from Holland, olives from Greece, cheese from France, mineral water from Ireland. The Irish knight was sure I’d understand. He arranged another visit for December, when Dr Moosa was in (unsuccessful) negotiation to buy Luton Hoo, the Bedfordshire stately home, for £25 million. This trip fell through because Dr Moosa was ‘distracted by’ the Asian stock-market crash – in which, according to the Hong Kong financial press, he lost $270 million. And so, in the spring of this year, having resisted Dr Moosa’s entreaties to fly me out first-class and put me up in his palace for as long as I wanted, I arrived at Dhaka airport on Telegraph expenses – incorruptible, impartial, giddy with integrity…
Three armed bodyguards have been assigned to me. Intimidating in black suits and ties, they greet me with flowers and a gold-framed plaque welcoming ‘the Honourable Mr Nigel’ to their country. Before there is a chance to visit the bureau de change, the bodyguards chauffeur me to the Sheraton (where I discover I’ve been mysteriously upgraded to a luxury suite, at no extra charge), and press into my protesting hand a wad of crisp new taka – local currency, which I am to distribute among the poor should I have no need of it. They also introduce me to Saiful, the liveried butler provided for my convenience by Dr Moosa. The bodyguards stand in the corridor outside the door all night; every so often, to reassure myself I haven’t imagined it, I look through the peephole to check they are still there.
Next day, I am greeted outside Dr Moosa’s office in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka by about 20 members of his staff. They are lined up along a red carpet, and as I walk along it half of them (prepossessing young women in green saris) place garlands of flowers around my neck, while the other half (self-conscious looking men in suits) shower me with marigold and jasmine petals. A video cameraman walks backwards to record my arrival and, once inside, he switches on a blindingly powerful tungsten light which enables him to carry on filming. His cables get everywhere, and everyone has to clamber over them, squinting and groping up the stairs. The confusion is compounded by the whine of metal detectors, set off by the handguns of my bodyguards.
Dr Moosa’s office is very James Bond baddie, circa 1974. There are 12 clocks on one wall, giving the times in a number of capitals. On the desk there is a bank of telephones of varying hues, denoting levels of urgency. On the wall behind the desk is a map of the world, with Dhaka, not Greenwich, at the centre. On the other walls are photographs of Prince Moosa, some with eminent figures – Dole, Forbes, Bush – others of him alone, apparently seated on a throne, with his chin held high. On a central table there are some autobiographies to browse – Lady Thatcher’s, Sir Edward Heath’s, Nelson Mandela’s, Sir David Frost’s – all with handwritten dedications to Prince Moosa. Mandela’s says: ‘To Prince Moosa. Best wishes to a wonderful friend. Mandela.’
Dr Moosa has not yet arrived – he’s on his way back from the Middle East – so I am greeted by Miss Dil Afronze, who has a degree in English literature and is director of the Datco Group, Dr Moosa’s umbrella company. Miss Afronze tells me how proud she feels to greet me, an eminent journalist from the famous London Telegraph, to her beloved motherland Bangladesh. She looks thoughtful for a moment, then adds that it is her esteemed chairman’s wish that I should enjoy my time in Dhaka and that, on his behalf, she would very much like me to know how eagerly she has been looking forward to my August visit. ‘Likewise I’m sure,’ doesn’t really seem an adequate response, so I waft the hand, as if to say, ‘Think nothing of it, old thing,’ then surreptitiously raise it to shield my eyes from the glare of the tungsten light. Filming continues for the next 15 minutes, as Miss Afronze and I exchange pleasantries. The temperature in the room rises with the heat from the portable floodlight, and the garlands begin to wilt and to weigh heavily around my neck.
Miss Afronze tells me she cannot believe how tall and handsome I am. I’m saying something along the lines of her seeming jolly nice too, when, craning over my floral neckbrace, I notice a brochure on the table next to me. It has pictures of tanks and missiles and American flags on its cover as well as a company name, Textron. When I ask Miss Afronze about it she smiles winningly and says that these are subjects about which I must ask Prince Moosa in person. She does tell me, though, that her esteemed chairman is the fountainhead of a vast business empire operating in more than 30 countries; that he runs most of his companies anonymously, and manages some of them from such off-shore tax havens as the Cayman Islands. Along with arms dealing, his main interests are in the construction industry, manpower services and the hotel trade. He bathes every day in rosewater, she adds, and owns 3,000 suits. ‘One can’t expect him twice to be seen in the same very apparel.’
Two hours pass before Dr Moosa arrives, in a cloud of expensive cologne, and embarks on a handshake that lasts a good half minute. In its dying moments he tells me how tall and handsome I am. Entering into the spirit of the thing, I return the compliment – although, as he has to look up quite a long way to meet my eye, I substitute ‘young’ for ‘tall’. He looks a dandy, though, in his finely tailored Italian suit and ruby rings. His belt buckle winks with clusters of diamonds. There are rubies and diamonds, too, on his gold Rolex, and when he notices me squinting as my retinas adjust to their brilliance he tells me that it is the most expensive watch in the world. That it cost $1 million.
He sits down on the tall chair behind his vast desk and invites me to sit opposite, on a low sofa, partially obscured by the fronds of a rubber plant. He doesn’t want to talk with the tape recorder on just yet – that can wait for a couple of days. But for an hour or so he chats amiably about his childhood, explaining in a soft, ponderous voice that he is a simple, modest, generous man from a humble background. It was his friend, the late, self-styled Prince Alexis II, claimant to the Russian throne and resident of Spain, who started calling him Prince Moosa, and when Boris Yeltsin joined in the name stuck.
Dr Moosa shows me an article in Nation Today, a Bangladeshi magazine, which claims that he is anyway descended from an Indian king and that DNA tests will one day prove it. With a serene smile and a shrug, he adds that he does not know where the story came from. After we’ve nibbled our way through a light lunch of what seem to be sausage rolls, he pops the latches on his crocodile skin briefcase and shows me the specially commissioned Mont Blanc pen he uses to sign his business deals. It is, he relates, solid gold, encased with 4,810 diamonds – the most expensive pen in the world.
In the evening I am invited to a banquet at Dr Moosa’s new ‘palace’ in the Gulshan district of the city. Called The Palace, this spacious white building nestles between the Russian and American embassies, and its gate is guarded by two aging soldiers with plumage in their caps. This time the gauntlet of greeting is formed by 20 or so dinner-jacketed servants, and the chap with the video camera is here, too. More garlands are proffered, more petals thrown. Dr Moosa, wearing a dinnerjacket, wing collar and a maroon-coloured ready-made bow tie with matching hankie, introduces me to Fatima, his wife of 22 years; Zubi, his ten-year-old son; and three friends – the editors of two local papers and the Irish knight from Birmingham, who would prefer not to be named in this article. They are the only other guests, but the dozen servants who stand silently with their backs to the walls give the impression that the function is well-attended.
There are about 15 fish and meat dishes of varied provenance. At one point, between courses, I assume some kind of postprandial game has begun as the Irish knight leaves and then returns to announce, for the benefit of the assembled company, that a General Vladimir is on the phone from Brussels. ‘Tell him I’ll ring him back later,’ says Dr Moosa with a theatrical wave of his bejewelled hand. Later, on a tour of The Palace, it transpires that Dr Moosa changes its interior design every six months or so. The silk Persian carpets are currently red, the lighting fluorescent, the paint on the walls a graduated canary yellow. There are two giant widescreen televisions along one wall. There is also a chandelier the size of a Ford Escort and, on the wall above the stairs, next to another row of 12 clocks, a gigantic gold-framed photograph of Dr Moosa, about 12ft by 18ft.
As we walk from room to room we keep coming across the two uniformed soldiers, the elder of whom shoulders his rifle and like Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army stamps to attention two seconds after the other one. Upstairs, there are indeed many suits – but not, even at a generous estimate, 3,000 of the blighters. There are dozens of bottles of rosewater around the bath, though. And in the bedroom – which I had read in the local press was 1,200 ft sq but is closer to 20 ft sq – are stacks of presentation boxes housing a footwear collection – by Gucci, Dior etc – that makes Imelda Marcos’s look amateurish. Normally, I am told, the more expensive examples are kept in a safe in Switzerland, along with Dr Moosa’s collection of 40 or so watches, but these shoes have been brought out for me to hold up to the fluorescent light, so I can appreciate the twinkling of the crushed diamonds in their heels and the chunky diamond pendants on their tongues. It is not clear where Mrs Moosa keeps her clothes. Or her shoes, come to that.
It is 11am, and a call is put through to my hotel room: someone who won’t give his name but insists that he and three of his colleagues have to meet me because there are things they think I should know about Dr Moosa. I agree to meet the caller by the swimming-pool in half an hour. He doesn’t show up. There is one more banquet to go, lunch this time, before Dr Moosa is prepared to sit and talk in earnest. At this, I am presented with more gifts: matching watches for my wife and me; matching silk folk costumes; two crates of oranges; a silver-plated salver with a dedication engraved on it from Prince Moosa to the Honourable Mr Nigel of the esteemed Telegraph; a trophy-like object with Prince Moosa’s image on it. As I have mentioned that my wife is just about to give birth, there is also a gold spoon for the baby. I consider mentioning my 17 nieces, nephews and godchildren.
I am told that giving presents to visitors is a custom in Bangladesh and that not to accept them is considered an insult. But with its shades of Asil Nadir and Mohamed Al Fayed, and the implication that a flattering profile is expected in return, it seems more appropriate to offer them to charity. Dr Moosa makes matters worse by saying that he has heard from ‘his media friends in London’ that I am an honourable man who cannot be bought. ‘I have made enquiries about you,’ he says. Instead of adding the expected ‘and I know where you live,’ he adds that he has declined repeated requests for interviews from CNN, the BBC, the Times and the Guardian, and has agreed to this one only because he has heard that I am ‘harmless’. I splutter into my coffee and ask him to elaborate. By ‘harmless’ he means that he is sure I want to write a balanced profile, rather than to cause him harm by conducting an investigation into his business interests.
To help me research my ‘balanced profile’ he shows me some articles that have already been written about him in the South-East Asian press. ‘I am in awe of Prince Moosa’s personage itself,’ one writer enthuses, ‘his unusual talent, his strength of mind, his hard labour, his patience, his humanitarian qualities, his taste, his versatility…’ Another says: ‘He is not only a tycoon, a billionaire, a philosopher, and a raconteur, but a masterful fashion setter of immaculate taste…’ Others refer to his ‘architectural body’, his ‘poetic prose’ and his ‘film star handsome face aglow with the beauty of his thoughts’.
As we head for the television hall I reach for my tape recorder – but Dr Moosa shakes his head and gives a pained expression. First we must watch his favourite programme, World-Wide Wrestling, on an American satellite channel. After this I ask about his arms dealing and he gives the pained expression again, looks imploringly at his wife and son sitting nearby, and says, ‘These things, Mr Nigel, I do not talk about in front of my family.’
And so we head off again through the dusty, overcrowded streets of Dhaka to his office, a mile or so away. We drive in his 4×4 which is, he points out, inevitably, the most expensive vehicle in the country. Here the international man of mystery does talk about ‘these things’, but in such a cryptic, elliptical way I’m never quite sure if we are talking about the same subject. He tells me, for instance, some fascinating stories about a certain Middle Eastern leader – but he says I am not to use them. He has, he explains, many enemies in Bangladesh, so he has to be careful. And he cannot let it be known which countries he does or does not do business with, because one might be the enemy of another and therefore take its trade elsewhere. He adds that the less he says, the longer he lives.
But he can elaborate on where his arms come from. ‘It depends on the customer. During tender, some specify the manufacture should be so-and-so country. It depends whether the countries have export or import licence.’ Asked if he has any qualms about making his fortune from arms trading he pulls a face, lips downturned, and runs a finger along his collar. ‘The question is whether your business is with legitimate government or with illegal people,’ he says. ‘Mine is all taxed. I have no conscience about this. If a government needs something and I am in a position to supply it officially, then I do. I do not dream of doing illegal arms dealing. Now it is much better than before. There are strict regulations. As long as civilisation is to exist, every country must have its defence system, its air force, army and navy.’
There is a Prince Moosa website on the internet which refers to him as the ‘Prince of the Cosmic Era’. When I ask how a cosmic prince gets into a rather shadowy business like arms dealing I get his version of his life story. He seems a bit touchy and vague about his age – presumably because he likes being described as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire – but he was born on 15 October ‘about 40 years ago’ in Faridpur, 100 miles from Dhaka, in what was then East Pakistan. He has four brothers and two sisters. His father, who died a couple of years ago, was a government official and didn’t have much money. As a schoolboy, Moosa Bin Shamsher – which translates as Moses, Son of Sword – knew he was different from the other children. ‘I was more charismatic, confident and intelligent. I never stood second.’
One of his formative experiences, he says, was when the Governor-General of Pakistan was on a visit to his district and the young Moosa, aged nine, stopped the cavalcade on the roadside, recited an English poem and begged him to help provide materials for his impoverished school. Provisions were duly made. And the President of Pakistan was so impressed when he heard this story that he invited the boy to meet him for tea in Dhaka and told him he was the ‘pride of his country’.
Dr Moosa started in business when a friend of his introduced him to a foreigner who wanted to buy textiles from Bangladesh. He started trading in cotton, formed a company and made his first million in five months. ‘In 1973 someone advised me to go to Calcutta to get a better price, better product. From here I moved to international markets and sold millions of dollars of goods to Syria and Britain.’ The jump from textiles to arms was an easy one, especially as his mentor in arms dealing, the Syrian-born businessman Akram Wajeh, worked with Aristotle Onassis and Adnan Khashoggi and was a friend of the Saudi royal family.
In 1995 a Bangladeshi newspaper hailed Dr Moosa as the ideal prime minister of the caretaker government. He dismissed the idea, and now says, ‘I don’t have political ambition. Not at all. My only ambition is to see my fellow countrymen happy. I want the world to see Bangladesh as a country not to be pitied but as a country that can feed and clothe its people properly.’ Dr Moosa makes no mention of East Pakistan’s successful war of independence from West Pakistan which, in 1971, claimed three million Bengali lives. According to an article published in the Daily Mail in 1994 at the time of Dr Moosa’s offer of £5 million to the Labour Party, Moosa had supplied stores to the West Pakistan army during the war of independence and at the end of it had had to flee Faridpur to escape lynching for his alleged collaboration with the enemy.
Quite the contrary, Dr Moosa tells me. He was held in a Pakistani concentration camp, and was twice on an execution list. Each week 15 people were arbitrarily selected and executed, pour encourager les autres. He escaped death the first time because the grave he had been forced to dig for himself filled with water during a monsoon. On the second occasion he tripped, fell and bashed his face so badly that he was freed – ‘because there is a tradition in our country of showing mercy to the sick and the old’. He has an awkward way of holding his right arm – because, someone has told me, of the bayonet injuries he sustained during his internment. But there was an article in the Guardian, also at the time of the Blair offer, which said he was beaten up after complaints about a manpower exporting business he had set up in the late Seventies. Moosa had vanished from Bangladesh, it said, resurfacing in late 1982 after General Ershad seized power in a military coup. The Guardian added that Dr Moosa was wanted in Malaysia, where he was alleged to have committed a fraud. A spokesman for Dr Moosa was quoted as replying that he had never even been to Malaysia, let alone committed fraud there.
When I call the Malaysian Embassy in London, they can find no record of this alleged fraud. Other calls paint a similarly opaque picture. The editor of Forbes magazine says Dr Moosa is not on their list of the world’s billionaires. ‘But that doesn’t mean he isn’t one,’ he adds. ‘There are more secret billionaires out there than you can ever imagine.’ A call to Mont Blanc reveals that Dr Moosa does indeed own the world’s most expensive pen – one of several Meisterstuck Solitaire Royals, each costing £97,500. Another call, to Pacific Western University in the United States, establishes that it awarded Moosa a PhD in 1988 after a correspondence course.
What about the strategically placed books and photographs? All genuine. There is even a biography of Tony Blair lying around, signed by the subject, although not specifically dedicated to Dr Moosa. I am shown another article from the local press. ‘Dr Moosa gave Tony Blair the greatest gift he could,’ it says, ‘a mirror to reflect his inner qualities for the people to applaud in the best way they knew how – through the ballot box. In a way he’s Tony’s best friend.’
So what does Dr Moosa have to say about the donation he offered to his best friend? ‘This thing, Mr Nigel, it is difficult for me to talk about. All I say is that Mr Tony Blair is one of the best prime minister. He is honest. He is not greedy for anything. I respect his principles in declining offer. I don’t know why all that fuss made of £5 million, though. Was it considered a big donation? Or was it ethics?’
Dr Moosa says he donated ‘large sums’ to help the victims of the terrible floods in Bangladesh in 1986 and 1988. And last winter, when 18 homeless people a night were dying during freezing weather, he distributed several tons of clothes around Bangladesh. Asked if he thinks it would help solve the nation’s problems if he donated all his money to the poor, Dr Moosa shakes his head. ‘No. Too big a problem. One Moosa alone cannot solve world problem. We have 120 million people. Most of them are poor. If you give them cash money, it will be spent overnight. It is better to help by creating jobs.’
It may be bad form to go on about money, but the rings he is wearing at the moment are – yes – the most expensive in the world, he says, the ruby alone worth $1.2 million. The emerald cost $700,000. I ask him how he feels when he looks at his rings and then at the grinding poverty in Dhaka. ‘I don’t have bad feeling,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Because I do a lot for them. I do a lot.’ He adds that the cause of the poverty is bad government. ‘Democracy is a luxury Bangladesh can’t afford because the people are too illiterate and corruptible. Britain and West should impose a government. Had there been no British rule worldwide the human civilisation wouldn’t have reached the present astounding stage. I want that the British should dominate the world and I wish that Mr Tony Blair could control this world domination. Many politicians I meet are of the opinion that the world would be better place if Downing Street still ruled waves rather than White House – because Americans are decadent with their nakedness.’
In his obsession with all things British Moosa reminds you of ‘Al’ Fayed. With a wry smile, he hints that he would have no problem getting British citizenship if he wanted it. ‘They look at your bank balance,’ he says.  It is his love of the British way, he adds, that makes him a stickler for gentlemanly conduct. It is not easy to get the measure of this man, to glimpse beyond the obfuscation, inconsistencies and hyperbole, but it is clear that, in person, Dr Moosa has a certain composure and flamboyance which may add up to charisma. The impression of breathtaking vanity and egotism may be just a matter of nuance being lost in translation. Asked if he would be content if he had no money left, for example, he says, disarmingly: ‘No. But the chances of it happening is nil.’ On the legacy he would like to leave to his eldest son Bobby (who is studying at the University of Texas), he says, ‘I am still very young. Around 40. I have many years to go. But my legacy will be my lifestyle. My cleanness. My morality. My modesty. My simplicity. My large heart for many people.’
One of the ways in which his large heart does its stuff is in the various offers he makes to the people of Bangladesh. He wanted to donate £125 million worth of fertiliser, he says, as well as build a $1 billion hospital. Both offers were declined. He says he cannot understand why: ‘Did they think I was trying to smuggle ICBMs in the fertiliser?’ When I ask a spokesman for the Bangladeshi Embassy in London about this, he explains the offers were refused because Dr Moosa seems too shadowy. ‘I’m sure we would accept his offers but we just don’t know enough about him. We wish we did.’
Because of the powerful fluorescent lighting in his office, it is easy to lose track of time. It is now dark outside, 9.30pm, and Dr Moosa has been talking since lunchtime. It may be because my resistance has been worn down, but I have reached a sneaking admiration for his chutzpah. He takes a (staged?) phone call as we are talking, for instance. It is, he says, from General Vladimir and concerns – I hope I wasn’t hallucinating at this point – a loan of $500 million that a certain Latin American country want him to make them. ‘We wait till after the elections,’ Dr Moosa says, ‘because the new generals will fire the old ones.’ A fax arrives moments later which he shows me, after carefully folding over the top of the page to hide the headed notepaper. It is, apparently, confirmation of the requested loan.
Exhausted and bewildered, I return to my hotel at midnight to find an anonymous typed note has been pushed under my door. It informs me that Dr Moosa is a stranger in Bangladesh. He is not a fair taxpayer. It requests that I ask myself if the documents shown me by Dr Moosa’s office are true or fake, and whether I know what his real business is inside and outside the country. It ends: ‘Don’t forget minimum professional ethics only because of unusual reception and gifts. Please don’t disclose this letter or quote a name. I trust you for your newspaper’s reputation. We don’t want to see a Western journalist is purchased by a so-called Bangladeshi TYCOON. Thank you.’ I like to think Dr Moosa would approve of the word ‘tycoon’ being in capital letters.
 

An author should be allowed his vanities. In the case of the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, the vanities fill two whole shelves of his library in North London. These are the books he has written since he graduated from Oxford in 1960, more than 75 of them. ‘This is where I start,’ he says, tapping the spine of one. ‘And here is my latest.’ He taps another, Churchill and the Jews, published this month. ‘Two shelves in chronological order. And over here….’ he rakes the backs of his fingers along another shelf, playing the spines as if they were piano keys. ‘… over here are my new translations.’ The steady, resonant tock of a grandfather clock can be heard in the room, dulled by the wall-to-wall books. ‘It’s a little vanity every author must be allowed.’
Actually this is a house, not a library. ‘I bought a five bedroom house, turned the smallest bedroom into my bedroom and put up shelving in the rest. Three floors of books. ‘What can you do?’ he says, almost apologetically. ‘An historian has to read.’ A tour of his shelves is revealing. Here is a book inscribed by Harold Wilson, for whom Gilbert once worked as an advisor. Here is the new book on cricket by John Major, for whom he also worked, advising him on the special relationship with America and accompanying him on trips there. On his most recent trip to the States, incidently, Gilbert attended the white tie banquet held in honour of the Queen at the White House. He was the only British guest present at the personal invitation of the president, as opposed to the British ambassador. ‘He remembered me from a talk I gave to his staff at the White House a few years ago.’
His subject?
‘War leadership.’
So he’s to blame!
‘No, no!’ Gilbert laughs wheezily. ‘It was after that.’
The 70 year old author has the energetic bearing and lucidity of a younger man, but his voice is subdued, his delivery careful. He is not afraid to leave long pauses as he mulls over a thought or searches for a precise word. Precision is his modus operandi. That and pedantry. ‘For me the word pedant is a paean of praise.’ He lectures regularly — he is a visiting professor at the University of Western Ontario, as well as an honorary fellow of Merton College, Oxford — and earlier today he gave a talk at University College, London. But most of his time is spend in scholarly silence broken only by the ticking of the clock and the rustle of a manuscript. This is where he works, when not in America or, the other country he visits frequently, Israel.
Sir Martin — he was knighted in 1995 for services to history and international relations —  is on his third marriage (he has a 40 year old daughter from his first and two sons in their twenties from his second). Clearly industriousness does not come without a domestic price. A measure of his output is the ‘by the same author’ page at the front of his books. Most authors have one. He has two. Among his most important works listed there are his one volume histories of the first and second world wars and his seminal history of the Holocaust. But it is for his eight volume biography of Churchill — as well as its numerous companion papers — that his reputation rests. In addition to these he has written more than a dozen themed books on Churchill, such as Churchill and America. But his finest and best selling work is the single volume Churchill: A Life, published in 1991, written in long hand with a new fountain pen bought for the task, and running to almost a 1000 pages. It is definitive.
He has had one huge advantage over the countless other pretenders  to the Churchill biographer crown: he is the official biographer and therefore the only man with, as it were, an ‘access all areas’ backstage pass. The story of how he pulled off this coup is an object lesson in timing and networking. In 1962, while working as a junior research fellow at Oxford, he approached Lady Diana Cooper, widow of Duff Cooper who had resigned from the cabinet after Munich, and asked if he could read any of her late husband’s unpublished material. She was impressed by him and wrote to ‘Darling Randy’ her friend Randolph Churchill: ‘Martin Gilbert loves Duff and hates the Coroner and is full of zeal to set history right. Do see him.’ (The Coroner was Chamberlain.) Randolph, who at  the time was researching his father’s archive with a view to writing a major biography, began sending Gilbert telegrams asking to see him. Gilbert was reluctant at first because, well, I’ll let him tell it: ‘Randolph invited me to Stour, his seat in Bergholt, Suffolk, but I was loathe to go because I had seen him drunk and loud mouthed at the Randolph Hotel bar and had heard about his unpleasant, extreme right wing views — views bordering on the fascist. He had a reputation for being what was then known as a fascist beast.’
Randolph was, indeed, known as ‘the beast of Bergholt’. He proved friendly enough though. One of his first questions to the young Gilbert was: ‘Are you musical? all Jews are musical.’ He was eccentric, too. He would refer to archive discoveries as ‘Lovely grub’. ‘History was for him a feast, full of delicious morsels,’ Gilbert says. ‘And so, despite his unpredictable rages, it became for me.’ Randolph would explode frequently, blowing hot and cold, but he took to his protégé because he didn’t ‘wilt under fire’. Gilbert recalls having to stay up until 2am on his first night at Stour, standing his ground. Next morning as Randolph was cheerfully pottering on his terrace, ‘his dressing gown blowing in the wind, his slippers shuffling on the flagstones’ he asked Gilbert to work for him, as one of a team of five researching the Churchill papers. ‘I thought it would last six months. It lasted a lifetime.’ When Randolph died in 1968 at the age of 57 Gilbert was the chosen successor. The Churchill papers were brought across country from Stour in a pantechnicon, under police escort and put, for safety, into the basement of the Bodleian library. They weighed 15 tons. ‘Merton gave me a sabbatical in 1970 and it lasted several decades.’
It’s a massive archive, and Churchill is a massive subject, arguably the most important in history — was he not overwhelmed by the scale of his task? Gilbert smiles thinly. ‘I’ve arranged the archive material for my next book on Churchill in my studio next door. I’ll show you if you like. You’ll be the first person to see it.’ He leads the way out of the house and around the corner to a modern looking studio. There are 25 desks lined up end to end, each with a pile of green papers on it, stacked according to years. ‘I’m beginning to think that it was a mistake laying them out like this. It does look daunting, doesn’t it? I aim to go through each file systematically. I decided not to use the catalogue. If you skip files that say “miscellaneous” then that is the file where the nugget will be.’
Initially the Churchill books took an age to research because of the official secrets act. ‘When I started working for Randolph in 1962 you couldn’t see anything after 1912. I remember visiting John Profumo to ask his permission to see just one or two files from the thousands on Churchill at the War Office in the  First World War.’
Although he never formally met his subject, he does remember being struck by how short he was the first time he saw him walking out of Downing Street in 1955. When I ask what the one question is he would ask Churchill if he walked into the room now he  reflects for a full minute, drumming his fingers. ‘Did he believe in 1903 that when he set up the Unionist Free Traders that he might be able to persuade the Tory party to adopt free trade. Or did he accept that he would have to become a liberal at that stage and that that was his way of signalling to the Tories and liberals that tariffs were an issue that he was not prepared to compromise upon.’
Oh. Well, I did ask. But given all the intrigue in Churchill’s life I had been expecting something more colourful. I try a different tack: does Gilbert ever catch himself talking to Churchill as he is working, you know, muttering to himself? ‘No, I don’t. And I’ve only twice dreamt about him. Once when I was having a real problem with the Dardanelles chapters and I was walking along the seafront and there he was in front of me. I rushed up to ask this pedantic question that was bugging me. The other time was a few weeks ago. He was being affable and pleased to see me.’
Gilbert has dedicated many, many years to the study of this one man — a lifetime, indeed — does he feel his subject has overshadowed his own life? ‘Not really, because I very deliberately tried to do some other pieces of writing in between the Churchill volumes. And I’ve always made an effort to read writing other than his own, so as not to lapse into a parody of his style.’
As well as a being an adventurer, a hard drinker and a maverick, Churchill had experience of war and understood its exhilarations and traumas. He also, of course, made history, rather than observing it from the sidelines. Sir Martin is 70 now. When he looks back at his own life does he feel a certain ennui, a sense of having lived a flat life by comparison with his hero’s, as an observer of history rather than a maker of it? ‘I know what you mean but no, I don’t think…I did my National Service but I had no aspirations to be a solider. I just published a book on the Somme and every page was difficult to write. I kept thinking back to my mindset at 20 and wondering whether I would have survived a day and kept sane. Churchill did, incidentally. He wrote a letter to his wife after two months in the trenches: “All the excitement dies away and there is only dull resentment.”’
His latest book is the marriage of his two big subjects, Churchill and the Jews. There was some controversy about it early this year when a Cambridge academic claimed to have found an anti-Semitic article that had been ghost written for Churchill — the article, which was never published, described Jews as ‘Hebrew bloodsuckers’. Gilbert swatted the academic away like a fly, pointing out that 1) he had first unearthed this document 20 years ago and quoted from it in a book and that 2) Churchill had refused to have the article published because he disagreed with it.
He asks to see my copy of  his new book. I hand it over gingerly, pointing that I have annotated it throughout. He tells me not to worry and turns to a page in which he quotes Churchill’s instructions to the ghostwriter. When he has read it he says: ‘… So we do know what he was thinking…’ This leads me to ask about something that has been bothering me. Even though he can claim to know the mind of Churchill better than anyone, he never speculates about what Churchill was thinking. Why is that? ‘Well I was fortunate with this book in that I didn’t need to because I had access to the secret evidence Churchill gave to the appeal commission on Palestine. It reveals his true positive feelings towards the Jewish state and his contempt for the Arabs. He had wanted his evidence destroyed in 1937 but his secretary Mrs Hills, who I knew, never threw anything away. She kept the proof copy. Thank you, Mrs Hills. She performed a service to history. Other prime ministers were more successful in destroying their archives. I had two spells of working for Harold Wilson and he used to just screw up documents and drop them in the waste paper basket. I saw him do it. “That is my archive,” he would say.’
Although speculation is not Sir Martin’s game, he has tried to piece together the substance of  Churchill’s private conversations. ‘I found an account of him warning Lloyd George that he must not have too many liberal Jews in his cabinet. Three being too many. That was in 1917.’
One of the difficulties in having Churchill as an historical subject was that he wrote so much history himself. Would it be fair to say that the difference between them as writers of history is that Churchill liked to tell a story whereas Gilbert prefers to stick to documented evidence? ‘Yes, Churchill liked the purple passages and the grand sweeps which are fun to read but they don’t advance the narrative.’ Historians who resort to the word ‘perhaps’ are simply trying to mask their failure to get to the truth, he adds. Perhaps, I say, but at least that is more fun. Gilbert smiles the thin smile. ‘I believe in true history. What happened in the past is unalterable and definite. Failure in historical research is no crime. It is one of the hazards of the profession.’ He also thinks you have to be careful not to leap to conclusions that the evidence does not support — ‘Wanting something to be the case does not make it so.’ This may be why he is regarded in the profession as more a chronicler of history than an interpreter of it. Perhaps.
Bearing in mind the current success enjoyed by TV historians such as David Starkey and Simon Schama, as well as the astonishing sales of books such as Stalingrad, I ask him why he thinks we are all suddenly so obsessed with history. ‘I think because it is now history. My generation lived through that war. It wasn’t history to us then. Now it is far enough in the past to seem very different from our lives. When I was writing about the Somme I thought: how do you describe what Britons went though? At least the Second World War had movement. But there is no movement in the First World War and I think that is why Americans are now anxious about Iraq. There is no movement. It has become a war of attrition.’
Speaking of which, I cannot help noticing a small stars and stripes flag on his desk. ‘That? The first President Bush gave it to me. We were filming in the White House and I gave him a copy of my Second World War book. Six months later, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, I started getting messages from journalists asking: “Did Churchill believe in assassination?” “What was Churchill’s view of one country invading another?” I was puzzled then I was told that on Air Force One that morning the president had produced my book and said: ‘I’m going to go into Kuwait. This book is proof I should do it.” The journalists had assumed it was my Churchill book. It wasn’t. It was the Second World War book I had given him.’
Timing and networking again. In his memoirs Bush describes how he had read the first 15 pages of the book, the ones which describe how the Germans had  begun killing civilians within days of invading Poland — mayors, priests, clerks. ‘Bush said he wasn’t going to allow history to repeat itself.’
So Gilbert was to blame for that war, too, I say.
He laughs wheezily, his face creasing momentarily before resuming an expressionless composure. A thought hangs between us unsaid: the historian did have a hand in history, after all. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.