Archive for Encounters

A meeting with the award-winning Sun
columnist, shortly after the murder of Jamie Bulger.

Published as the ‘Monday Profile’ in the Guardian, 27 February 1993.

A profile of the television dramatist Dennis Potter. I met him early one morning in his agent’s office, near Covent Garden. He was still drinking wine from the previous night’s party connected to the launch of ‘Lipstick On Your Collar’ - agonising but lucid. Published in the Guardian, 15 February 1993.

In the summer of 1990, I visited Slovakia, then still part of Czechoslovakia, to watch preparations for the first general election since the Velvet Revolution. Jan Budaj had recently emerged as leader of Public Against Violence (VPN), the Slovak sister organisation of Civic Forum, but I had previously met him in the Communist era. Having been much impressed by the courage with which he had then lived as a persistently harassed dissident, I was shocked when I heard, just after my return to Britain (and the publication of this article), that he had been forced to resign after the closure of the polls. He was the victim of a ‘lustration’ process involving the manipulative publication of information from secret police files in Prague. Having won the election through Budaj’s campaign, Public Against Violence split in 1991, and power went to the breakaway Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, lead by the populist Vladimir Meciar. This article was published as ‘Gesture Politics’ in New Statesman and Society, 1 June 1990, pp. 16-20

In December 1987, I stepped into an opulent new building on Fifth Avenue in New York City and found myself face to face with Donald Trump. Our eyes did not meet, but I did write this article about the man, his just published autobiography and his Tower. Published as ‘The man who would be Christ’, New Statesman & Society, 17 June 1988