The Times, November 01, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Born in Greece, educated at Cambridge and now the queen of Capitol Hill: Arianna Huffington’s superblog has made her one of the most influential political commentators in America Vince Bucci There’s a perfect Arianna moment during our long interview in the heat of the Los Angeles summer, when I ask her whether she’s seen Swing Vote, a highly topical film that had just opened in America, starring and bankrolled by Kevin Costner. “Yes,” she says. “I am in it…” Pause. “I play myself.”

The Times, October 25, 2008 - Ginny Dougary You don’t just eat at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant, you have a whole sensory experience. Ginny Dougary drops by his laboratory to talk the science and psychology of food, families and uncontrollable fury For those of us afflicted with vivid imaginations, it can be disturbing to hang out with Heston Blumenthal. Odd thoughts cross your mind such as what would it be like to be served a life-sized head of the chef-owner of the Fat Duck. First: you and your fellow diners would be invited to insert earphones connected to iPods which would play barnyard sounds of contented chickens clucking. A waiter would waft a distilled essence of something suitably earthy: fresh hay, say, laced with something borderline unpleasant to stimulate the senses. You would then be presented with a silver spoon and instructed to tap the patron’s bald pate which would crack open to reveal a rich brew of truffled brains, which you may or may not find delicious depending on how easily you could overcome your conditioned resistance to cannibalism.

The Times, October 04, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Celia Birtwell’s floral designs defined a decade – and now they’re in vogue again with the Topshop set Celia Birtwell, a name that once seemed firmly consigned to the past, is enjoying a prodigious renaissance – and her new fans, legions of them judging by her sell-out collections, are the daughters and granddaughters of the generation of women in the late Sixties and early Seventies who once wore, or could only dream of wearing, those gorgeous epoch-defining frocks, the fabric designed by herself and tailored by her ex-husband, the late, murdered Ossie Clark.

The Times, July 26, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Now the dust has settled on her divorce, Kay Saatchi has returned to her first love: modern art. With her pick of Britain’s best new talent on show in London, she tells Ginny Dougary about her future plans – and past mistakes

The Times, July 5, 2008 - Ginny Dougary In a frank interview, the famed writer talks about motherhood, Catholicism, her parents and soulmate Harold Pinter Lady Antonia Fraser adjusts her pearls, gazes out of the french windows opening out to the garden, and tells me to f*** awf. This, five minutes into our interview, comes straight after her waving a two-fingered salute at Private Eye.

The Times, June 28, 2008 - Ginny Dougary As well known for his epic drug taking as his iconic tales, Irvine Welsh seems now to be embracing middle age. But as he unveils his new novel, Ginny Dougary finds life in the old punk yet The good news is that Irvine Welsh, having been obliged to give the subject some thought, does not believe that all men are potential paedophiles. What he does find interesting is that advertising and the mainstream media pander to a perceived tendency in men to respond to images of females captured on the cusp of puberty.

The Times, June 20, 2008 - Ginny Dougary It took time, expense and stress - but I know how not to fix up your home After my six-month odyssey to find a flat in London, following on from decades of family living in Nappy Valley in Wandsworth, I finally had a new home - but fresh challenges lay ahead.

The Times, June 14, 2008 - Ginny Dougary John Humphrys has a reputation as the rottweiler of Today. But interrogating the interrogator, Ginny Dougary discovers a self-critical soul who talks of life, death, fear and fatherhood John Humphrys, the so-called rottweiler of Radio 4, is in fact a pussycat. This would have been more of a surprise if I were one of the six million-odd regular listeners of the Today programme, where Humphrys has honed his interrupting skills with filibustering politicians over the past 21 years, but since I can think of nothing less soothing than starting my day with the soundtrack of argumentative discourse on governmental policy, this is not the case.

The Times, June 13, 2008 - Ginny Dougary If your own search for a flat proves futile, it can pay to turn to the professionals This time last year I was renting an open-plan flat high up in a mustard-coloured tower next to Tate Modern and thinking of writing something AbsoLoftly Fabulous about the renting life, with its bank of 24-hour porters and fishbowl windows. After my decades in Wandsworth's Nappy Valley, it was more like the glamour of Sex and the City (without the racy bits).

The Times, May 16, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Ginny Dougary on the pleasures of writing dirty songs for the Brighton City Singers Artists, even those who are not fortunate enough to be represented by a gallery, can show their work in art fairs, restaurants and shops. Writers get to see their words in books and magazines. But what of poor composers, many of whom never have the chance to experience their pieces coming to life?

The Times, May 14, 2008 - Ginny Dougary Shlomo, beatboxer extraordinaire, is a courteous, cleancut young man with good teeth. This I know because he bared them repeatedly while demonstrating the basic skills of a percussive vocalist - a lip-smackingly resonant “B-uh”, followed by a wide-grinned “T-uh” and the finale of an open-mouthed primal pout “K-uh” - in a masterclass conducted for the benefit of my 17-year-old son and his mother.

Ginny Dougary is nominated as Interviewer of the Year >> Read more >>

The Times, April 5, 2008 - Ginny Dougary George Clooney’s easy banter and high-brow films have made him the thinking person’s heart-throb. But what do we really know about him? Ginny Dougary has a close encounter with a most elusive superstar. George Clooney is a guys’ guy, a gays’ guy and, obviously, a ladies’ man. It’s not just the looks and the voice, the irony (a slanting sense of humour not generally shared by his compatriots), the charm, the political awareness and unphoney compassion – an American who isn’t an embarrassment to America; it’s the whole package. He must be too good, surely, to be true?

BBC News, Friday, 4 April 2008 - Julian Joyce Multi-millionaire poet and publisher Felix Dennis has retracted a drunken murder "confession" made to a newspaper journalist. But even if Mr Dennis's words turn out to be - as he says - "a load of hogwash", how unusual is it for genuine murderers to risk their freedom by sharing their secrets?

Daily Mail, 3 April 2008 'I killed him,' Dennis told interviewer Ginny Dougary from The Times at his Warwickshire mansion. 'That's all you need to know.' Read the entire story at The Daily Mail >>

The Guardian, Thursday April 3 2008 - Esther Addley He has been jailed for obscenity, overcome an enthusiastic addiction to crack cocaine, and become a best-selling poet. But has he also killed a man? That was the dramatic claim made by the multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis in a newspaper interview published yesterday, a statement he has since retracted, describing it as "a load of hogwash".

The Guardian, Thursday April 3 2008 - Stephen Moss 'I once killed a man." It's not a bad headline to put over an interview - in this case the estimable Ginny Dougary's interview with Felix Dennis in the Times yesterday. Her paper obviously thought it was pretty good, too, as it slapped a photograph of the millionaire publisher on the front page with that quote underneath - a plug doubling as news.

The Guardian, Monday April 7 2008 - Ginny Dougary When Felix Dennis 'confessed' to Ginny Dougary that he had killed a man, the interviewer faced a decision: file the sensational exclusive or fast-forward the tape. She has no doubts that she made the right choice.

The Times April 2, 2008 - Ginny Dougary The Oz trial defendant who is now a billionaire publisher with an empire that includes Maxim and The Week talks about poetry, whores, his past addiction to crack cocaine and the time he killed a man - a confession he later retracts.

The Times - March 22, 2008 - Ginny Dougary From terrorism to spirituality, no topic is off limits for Britain's hairiest comedian. Omid Djalili, as a British-born Iranian comedian, offers many illuminating insights into disparate strands of different cultures. Did you know, for instance, that the BBC took a view on the hirsuteness tolerance of its audience? This emerged when Omid – it surely won't be long before he becomes a one-name brand like Oprah, Delia, Madonna – was advised to move a flesh-revealing shot from the first episode of his television series to the last.

The Times - January 19 2008 - Ginny Dougary From Graham Greene to Apocalypse Now and the vanished world of French colonials, in Vietnam Ginny Dougary encounters a land of haunting resonances

The Times - December 28 2007 - Ginny Dougary The last time I communicated with Benazir Bhutto was via e-mail in October after the first attempt on her life when she returned to Pakistan to fight the free elections which General Musharraf had promised.

The Times - December 13, 2007 - Ginny Dougary As the new St Trinian’s film is to be released, our former Cheltenham Ladies’ College pupil recalls her days of extreme misbehaviour at the august institution Hurrah, yaroo, jolly hockey-sticks and all that . . . St Trinian’s is back, this Christmas’s anarchic antidote to Harry Potter, and one of the starlets, the fetchingly named Talulah Riley, warns us that she and her fellow celluloid schoolgirls will be doing “anything and everything — there’s drugs, there’s sex, there’s tattoos and piercings”, to which the director adds (perhaps redundantly): “It’s going to shock some people.”

The Times - October 25, 2007 - Ginny Dougary How should you interview a celebrity? Our correspondent has some advice for Steve Buscemi Interview, the movie, boldly goes where no actual celebrity interview is likely to go or have gone before. It’s an intense two-hander starring Steve Buscemi (who also directed) as the duplicitious, alcoholic, pill-popping, manipulative, self-destructive, arrogant, lazy hack and Sienna Miller as the duplicitious, alcoholic, coke-snorting, etc, soap star.

The Times - November 3, 2007 - Ginny Dougary Robert Redford was the screen heart-throb of his generation, but he never quite played the Hollywood game. Back in the director’s chair, he talks about being an outsider, his looks and why he is in mourning for his country It’s a measure of Robert Redford’s enduring appeal, even at the grand age of 70, that when he says, “I’m all yours”, just for a fraction of a second, a tiny bit of you wishes it were true. In truth, despite an occasional dimpled grin – when you catch a flicker of the old Redford screen charisma that made your 13-year-old heart pound in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – and surprisingly gentle manners, he has neither the playfulness nor the hint of danger of the natural-born flirt.

Warring professors of cultural theory and creative writing fight themselves to a standstill over Islam

Maev Kennedy Saturday October 13, 2007 The Guardian

Martin Amis, interviewed by Ginny Dougary, Times, September 2006

'Moderate Islam is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere it is supine and inaudible.'

Lord Tebbit gave Mr Cameron another pre-conference jolt. He said that Baroness Thatcher knew exactly what she was doing when she visited the Prime Minister at Downing Street two weeks ago. She was aware that Mr Cameron had been at pains to distance himself from her, the former Conservative chairman added. The devastating intervention from Lord Tebbit came in an interview with Ginny Dougary in The Times Magazine, to be published on Saturday. He drew a wounding comparison between Mr Brown, on whom he lavished praise, and Mr Cameron, whom he criticised for his lack of experience and his stand on grammar schools. “I think we lack somebody of the standing of Margaret,” he said when asked to name the Conservatives’ biggest asset.

The Times - September 29, 2007 - Ginny Dougary Norman Tebbit discusses Cameron, loss and multiculturalism Lord Tebbit brought up the white rabbit as we scuttled down corridor after dimly lit corridor in the gentlemen’s club late afternoon hush of the House of Lords. It is the women we pass – of a certain age, two of them in wheelchairs – who greeted him with tremendous warmth. Later, over tea – as formal and English, with the possibility of triangular cucumber sandwiches and oozy cakes, as tea at the Savoy – he tells me that one of the smiling Baronesses had been a real toughie, an ultimate Tebbitian compliment, as the former head of intelligence in one of the trickier countries in the African continent. He is quite the man for a flourish, verbal and otherwise, opening the door for a younger Baroness with a courtly hand gesture; Baroness Amos returns the favour with a rather cool look.

The Times - September 25, 2007 - Ginny Dougary Why do so many teenage girls play up to the slutty, binge-drinking image promoted by lads’ mags? Whatever happened to hard-won feminism? It was a column last year by Rosie Boycott, the writer and broadcaster, that first sounded an alarm bell. She was reeling from having read Nuts, one of the younger lads mags (read by schoolboys as well as young adult males), in which every woman who had achieved something in her own right – other than possessing a great pair of boobs - was routinely dismissed as a boot-faced minger or dyke. Dame Ellen MacArthur, who had just achieved another nautical first, came in for a particular drubbing: “a miserable, sobbing, whining bitch in a boat. . . basically a frigid dyke-looking, yachting c***”.

The Times - August 21, 2007 - Ginny Dougary She married two Sixties legends and inspired three of the era’s greatest love songs. But Pattie Boyd’s life in the most famous love triangle in rock was far from glamorous