Melia Belli is a self confessed feminist. She went to a state (‘public’) school in San Francisco and later got four A levels. She’s also vegetarian, teetotal and American. She wants to be a lawyer and is travelling in the Himalayas this summer before going to Glasgow University. Not your stereotypical debutante, in other words.

A worldly and friendly 19-year-old, she is mini-skirted, with a fake fur jacket and a self-assured air. Her mother, like those of all good debs, sits protectively nearby. ‘I think it’s a good idea to learn how to walk gracefully,’ says Melia, in her transatlantic accent. ‘I’ve been practising turns and sticking my tummy and bum in.’ (When we spoke after the Berkeley Dress Show, she was glad it was over. ‘They should give you knee pads, we were so nervous.’

She’s not the type of gel to measure her life in party invitations. So what is her view of the traditional debutante accomplishments, like wine-tasting and setting tables? ‘Well, I don’t drink and I don’t usually eat at tables. I haven’t done that for a while and the last time I did, I couldn’t quite remember where everything went. I normally eat around the kitchen, and I tend to eat in my car a lot.’

So far her impression of the other debs has been positive. ‘These girls seem pretty nice and not snobby or upper-class. To a certain extent debs are driven and know what they want,’ she says, seemingly describing herself. ‘They are elegant and maybe even opinionated and headstrong.’ And does she follow the instincts of deb mothers to seek out The Right Sort of people? ‘Not at all. I choose my own friends. If there are people here I’d like to associate with, then I will.’

She thinks the debutantes reflect women across society now. ‘Nobody is looking for a husband. We are young women, not girls any more. We are making our own choices. Most of us have decided we want to go on and have a career, to make it by ourselves and then find a husband. I don’t think we are doing this just to find men.’

Her mother, who did the Season in the States and would have been disappointed had Melia decided not to follow her, introduced her to the idea of being a debutante. ‘My father doesn’t think much of it.’ The child of a broken marriage, Melia is an only child and currently lives in San Francisco. Her mother studies business at Oxford University and her father, a lawyer, lives in the States.

She hasn’t been told much about the Season, so she doesn’t know what to expect. ‘It should be quite different from America where it was much more frivolous and didn’t have a social cause,’ she says. ‘It’s a bit archaic there.’ No problem with dancing through the recession then? ‘No, because of the events will raise money for charity.’ And she doesn’t plan to buy any new clothes.

So is she keen to meet the Debs’ Delights? ‘English men are quite different from American ones. I’ve had quite a few English boyfriends and they are nice. They’re a lot politer. You don’t get many Americans opening doors for you or paying for your dinner.’

She looks forward to the pinnacle of the Season, Queen Charlotte’s ball, when the lissome gels in white gowns curtsy to a birthday cake. ‘It seems like it should be fun. I don’t have a problem with curtsying to a cake if that’s what’s done. It’s not like bowing to an idol or sacred cow.’ She doesn’t plan to take it at all seriously. ‘At the end of the Season, I would like to have established some friendships. I’d like it to have been an experience. And I’d like to have learned to waltz.’

CAMILLA’S STORY THE Hon Camilla Astor is a reluctant debutante. One feels that she has been forced into it, although she would never say so. Her social aspirations don’t run in the direction of the Season: she’d rather be riding or taking photos. She also prefers to dress scruffily. She even dislikes the snotty name ‘debutante’. What would she rename these party girls? ‘The Social Gatherers’.

We’re talking in the Berkeley Hotel, and this is the only interview of a, er, Social Gatherer without her mother. ‘I think it’s very amusing. All the mums absolutely adore showing off their daughters,’ she says later, talking about the mothers’ lunches. ‘My mum thinks it’s quite funny too.’ Camilla has a beautiful, sometimes wistful, face and a diffident air. She is also delightful and genuine. ‘I normally wear jeans,’ she says, quietly spoken, frowning and fiddling nervously with her ring. Today she’s wearing a smart red jacket and a black chiffon mini.

Camilla is at St George’s, Ascot, doing her A-levels, so her social life ‘isn’t that good’. She thinks the heady round of cocktail parties and summer balls will be about meeting lots of people. (Her grandmother, Irene Haig, daughter of Lord Haig, did the Season.) Does she like parties? ‘I do,’ she says, sounding unsure. ‘But it was my father’s idea that I should do this. I’m not sure why.’ Why is she so unconvinced? ‘I think it’s purely because I’m shy.’

She’s the 17-year-old daughter of Lord Astor of Hever, whose father was proprietor of The Times. ‘I don’t really think I have a class. I don’t like to position myself, anyway.’ But technically she is an aristocrat. ‘I suppose I am. But it’s quite pompous thinking that way. I don’t use ‘the Hon’ if I can help it. I just stay ‘Camilla’. Dad’s just like me, he doesn’t use his title unless he has to, which is nice.’

Some estimate that the Season costs up to £30,000 a head. Does Camilla think it’s necessary to be rich? ‘Oh gosh no, not at all. I haven’t spent any money at all on it.’ So does she think the Season elitist? ‘I suppose it is, yes, oh God, I don’t know how to answer this. The answer is also ‘no’ because there are so many people doing it that you get a good variety.’ Certainly, rather than just being aristocrats, there are now meritocrats and non-Brits on the social list. But no Sharons and Kevins. ‘I enjoy meeting a broader mix,’ says Camilla, who says she’s led a sheltered life. ‘But it is quite nice meeting people you will probably be around for the rest of your life.’ So far she has greatly enjoyed the debs she has met. ‘People have expected us to be bitchy and catty, but we have been laughing a lot and having fun. It’s been really relaxed.’

We talk about her expectations. Is she looking forward to Royal Ascot and the Henley Royal Regatta? ‘None of it has struck me as particularly wonderful. I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to do things like that.’ What would she rather do by choice? ‘Go on holiday.’ She will, however, host a party during the Season. She thinks her father is planning a bash for her 18th birthday. ‘But it might be quite a disaster because it’ll be in Kent.’ And boys? She had a boyfriend until two months ago. She went out with him for four months. (She says she’d like to get married and have children, ‘eventually’.) Would she like to come out of the Season having met a new man? ‘Oh gosh, no, not at all.’ On being offered the option, she says: ‘I’d rather go out with a pop star than a Hooray Henry, that would be more exciting.’ What does she think the debs’ delights will be like? ‘I suppose they’ll be what you expect of a man – good-looking and charming.’ In conclusion, she rather fears how people will regard her now that she’s a debutante. ‘I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I don’t want to be seen as really snobbish.’

ELISABETH’S STORY Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh, 17, is keen as mustard about being a debutante. She sits like an anchorwoman and talks like a professional, with her hands placed just so on her knees. She’s self-possessed and exuberant, sophisticated and immaculate. ‘Cross your legs the other way,’ says her mother. ‘It’s always better to cross your legs upstage than downstage.’ It’s all, in Elisabeth’s words, such fun.

Elisabeth is at West Heath school, as was Princess Diana. ‘I want to go to university, ideally to Cambridge,’ she says, in slightly clipped upper-class tones. Her father was ‘a Rank movie star in the Fifties’, and she is quite tempted to launch herself into showbiz after university. She also thinks it would be ‘an honour’ to be named Deb of the Year.

It isn’t necessary, she says, to be wealthy to do the Season. ‘That’s not important. You don’t have to go out and buy new clothes or anything because the clothes you’ve got are perfectly adequate. A lot of the events are for charities, so you aren’t spending money as much as giving it.’ She enjoys parties. ‘Well, yes, who doesn’t? I’m not a party animal or anything. But it’s such fun.’ Before the Season began, her diary was filled with charity balls, dinner parties and King’s Road shopping trips. She sees the next few months as an exciting time. She enthuses about helping the NSPCC and Queen Charlotte’s charities, and is junior chairman for the latter’s ball. ‘If I want to raise money for charity one day, I’ll have benefited from the experience.’

She also feels positive about widening her social sphere. ‘Being at boarding school, you don’t meet so many people.’ She’s keener on meeting girls, but says she doesn’t know many boys. ‘I haven’t ever had a boyfriend. I meet boys at things like parties. But I don’t want to launch myself at the world of boyfriends yet.’ Is she looking for a husband? She laughs. ‘I haven’t met any of the chaps, but I’ve got to go through university and live my life a bit.’

The delightful thing is that she’s going to meet ‘like-minded people’; when she leaves school, she can do social things with them, such fun. ‘Probably for the rest of your life you’re going to go to Ascot and things. So it is such fun to do it as a beginner with lots of other people who are beginners.’ She has found the other girls jolly friendly and uncompetitive. ‘We were bought up to be nice to each other. It’s very jolly.’ Her own party will be unusual. ‘You’re always starving, after balls. The first thing you think of is food. So after Queen Charlotte’s I thought I’d have a breakfast party for everyone to toast my birthday in champagne . . .’

‘Just the girls who curtsey to the cake,’ corrects her mother. ‘. . . and orange juice,’ she resumes. ‘At four in the morning.’

She doesn’t think the Season will change her. ‘I don’t think I’ll be a different personality at the end. My spectrum of experience will have increased and I’ll have grown up, which I would have done anyway. I have a joie de vivre and enthusiasm. I’m looking forward to it tremendously. I just can’t wait to get on with life. I am at a very happy moment of my life.’

Tonight Britain’s best-known hypnotist, Paul McKenna, the former Radio One disc jockey, will be found at the Dominion Theatre putting ordinary people under extraordinary spells. Like turning an accountant into an uninhibited Elvis Presley and getting a systems manager to wander around in the interval, deep in trance and behaving (hilariously) as if the 2,000-strong audience is full of long-lost relatives.

McKenna’s show is now a cult fixture of the London theatre scene. Few big-name comedians or pop stars could pack a huge auditorium like the Dominion as many times a year as McKenna does. Many of his fans – and they include people like Ruby Wax, Lenny Henry, Dawn French, Jools Holland, Hanif Kureishi and Barry Humphries – return time after time. Annabel Croft, for instance, has seen his show six times.

Hypnotism has made him rich, clever and the proud partner of a beautiful girlfriend, Clare Fordham, whom he first met nine months ago when she came on stage to be hypnotised. They were later introduced at dinner and now live together. He refers to her as ‘the greatest love of my life’, but quickly denies that hypnotism helped him win her. ‘When people ask whether I use hypnotism to get girls, my reply has always been that I don’t need to. That would be like being a bank robber.’

Today, aged 28, he drives a Mercedes, lives in a £150,000 four-bedroom house in Middlesex – ‘It’s all I could afford five years ago. I’m moving somewhere more opulent soon’ – and is well on his way to becoming a millionaire, although he won’t disclose how much he makes from the shows. Nor how much he might get from the range of self-hypnosis videos – money-spinning tapes on how to improve your sex life, combat stress, slim and quit smoking – which can be bought in most high streets. ‘I watched and studied rich people because I wanted to get rich,’ he says. ‘I found they had things in common, like seeing crises as opportunities . . . But feeling rich is not about having a Rolls-Royce and a big house. It is a feeling of success, confidence and security.’ So he programmed himself with that anyway. ‘And then my earnings increased tenfold. That’s when the show started to take off.’

Not bad for a lad who, in formal academic terms, gained only five 0-levels and one A-level, which was in art. But then he says he has also used hypnosis to improve his IQ and increase his reading speed. ‘A psychologist friend of mine measured my IQ and said it had jumped 20 points. I am going to do Mensa. I would guess it’s around 145 or 150. I’d like it to be higher, off the scale. If you can make a little jump, you should be able to make a big one.’

For the uninitiated, here’s an introduction to his stage act. At the beginning of Paul McKenna’s Show, about 100 volunteers go up on stage and he chooses his participants from those he has successfully induced to lock their hands as if with Superglue. Gradually the numbers are whittled down to about 10 whom he helps to become unwitting comics, without ever humiliating them. He won’t hypnotise pregnant women, or those who are drunk or very stressed. ‘No harm can come to them. But they might start catharting. I don’t want someone on stage alleviating their stress by crying or something.’

Last Friday the audience was very working-class; other times it is full of Fulham stockbrokers. There were three women and 10 men on stage at one point. Is there a difference between the sexes? ‘I find on stage men tend to be funnier than women.’

In front of the audience, McKenna is slick, like a younger Paul Daniels. Off stage, he is a slight, besuited and slightly nervous man who looks older than he is and has hypnotic blue eyes. He talks in a seamless, information-packed, broadcasterly manner, often using pop psychology buzz words, with the patter of a You Can Make Your Life Work salesman. Amusingly, it also becomes apparent that McKenna mirrors, shortly afterwards, every body movement the interviewer makes. ‘Oh dear, no one’s ever noticed before,’ he says. ‘The aim is to create greater harmony for communication.’ McKenna was first introduced to hypnotism at the age of 22 when he worked on Radio Chiltern and invited a hypnotist on his programme. He was hypnotised and amazed at the experience, so borrowed a couple of books on the subject and taught himself. He has never had any formal training. He first hypnotised someone, a friend, in his back garden when he was 23. McKenna then plied his trade doing stag nights, Oxbridge balls and Army bases. ‘My worst experience was with an audience of estate agents when nobody volunteered.’

He had a happy childhood, with the exception of his Jesuit education at St Ignatius College. He is vehement in his hatred of Catholicism. ‘What a bunch of mind manipulators,’ he says, without irony. ‘I couldn’t believe the brutality, mostly mental brutality. You’re guilty if you have sex before marriage. If you do anything, you’re guilty.’ Raised in Enfield, his father is a retired building contractor, his mother a teacher, and his younger brother a surveyor.

At the age of 19 he was developing an interest in eclectic New Age matters, learning from Zen Buddhism, pop psychology, the American psychotherapist Milton Erickson, transcendental meditation and radionics. He had also done exegesis, a weekend of wholesale enlightenment. ‘I think a lot of people who end up in cults are looking for surrogate families. That wasn’t true of me. I did it because a friend said, ‘I’ve just done this course where they lock you up in a hotel room, shout at you for three days and charge you £250. I laughed my balls off’.’

Two years ago, he used the hypnosis techniques he’d been studying to discover what was in his subconscious. ‘I studied the thought patterns of successful people and fed those to my subconscious, and immediately I began to feel so much more in control of my life. I no longer feel victimised. I never get depressed now.’

McKenna takes hypnotism very seriously and uses the entertainment side simply as a hook, ‘to show people that hypnotism works’. ‘If you could bottle hypnotism, it would be the most powerful drug in the world today. But it’s not a panacea.’

To the sceptical, of course, McKenna has simply found an easy way of making money. Debunkers question whether his stage show is fixed (‘I wish it were. That would be much easier’). They maintain that hypnotism is dangerous. And they say that there are good and bad hypnotists and no way of telling whether someone is one or the other.

But he believes it is important for people to discover what they are capable of. ‘Most of us,’ he says, ‘spend more time learning to work a food mixer than we do our brains.’

With fellow hypnotist Michael Breen, he holds seminars to teach people self-hypnosis and has offered courses in self-development, the cure of phobias (‘I charge by the change’) and future-life progression. ‘You can see yourself in future lifetimes, you may be a different sex. It’s like a snapshot of karma, so why not deal with those things now in this life rather than have to go through them in a future life?’ He has also investigated past-life regression (‘Fascinating. People talk in foreign languages’) and is now moving into the corporate world and starting to work with companies on stress control and hypnotic negotiation.

His greatest interest is realising human potential and success conditioning, ‘instead of going to a hypnotist because there is something wrong with you’. To this end, he has been working weekly for the past three months with Olympic fencer Johnny Davis who is ranked 26th in the world. ‘I don’t know if he’s going to win a gold medal, but he tells me he’s vastly improved.’

Psychics and astronomers say McKenna is special. Ask him if he is normal, and he laughs a lot. ‘What do you think?’ But does he feel different? ‘When I was a child, I felt very different from everybody else. And by my teens, I felt incredibly different. I felt everybody else had got it wrong. I didn’t feel exactly lonely or alone. But I don’t find that many people who think like me.’

The millionaire cowboy-booted hunk opposite me has been hailed the most macho star in America, the king of the martial arts and the heir to Bruce Lee. Ten years ago he was as big as Stallone, bigger than Shwarzenegger. Now he’s been eclipsed not just by these two, but by younger versions of himself, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Still Chuck remains the darling of the video rent market, with one of the largest world wide sales. So what’s it like now just to follow in the footsteps of Shwarzenegger and Stallone? ‘You don’t compare yourself to anyone or you start to drive yourself crazy. Sly, Arnold and I are all friends. I’ve known Arnold for 25 years. Of course he’s at the top of the heap right now. But the three of us have talked about success. You can be number one today and number 50 tomorrow. You just take the success and enjoy it when it comes.’ Chuck, 50, who is not as tall as he should be and also looks younger than he should, has a beard that covers a passive face, and eyes that challenge defensively. His father was a Cherokee Indian.

Despite the fact that he has rubbed shoulders with US Presidents, he himself came from the wrong side of the breadline. In 1990, Chuck divorced Dianne, his wife of 30 years, and immediately got involved with a 19-year-old fashion designer. He was 48. ‘Monica was a very mature 19-year-old. She met the President of the United States, heads of state and the chief of operations in the army with me, and she fitted in easily.’ They stayed together for two years. Now Chuck is dating women, but lives alone on his Texas cattle ranch.

‘I went from living with my mom, to my wife. I’d never been alone. That’s probably why I jumped straight into a relationship. Now I stay real busy, I have to be doing things.’ He is open and gentle, and while appearing laid back, says he is incredibly driven. Growing up without a father left him feeling insecure. ‘Insecurity comes out either as over aggressiveness or over passiveness. In my case it was the latter. I was so insecure, I couldn’t prove anything – even to myself.’

This all changed when he went to Korea as a serviceman and learned the martial arts. He believes that the philosophy behind martial arts makes all things possible – ‘I have to give the martial arts much of the credit for the success in my life’ – and karate helped instil in him self-control and drive, and enhanced his self-esteem. Nowadays he feels very content. ‘Whatever I want in life, I know I can get it. But I have nothing more I want.’

So what happens when a tough guy’s muscles turn flabby? He smiles. ‘I don’t plan on that happening.’

Peter Scudamore used to think the best way to deal with a tricky situation was to panic. Now, he prefers to handle difficulties with prayer and goes to Catholic church most Sundays. ‘I’m not as good a Christian as I should be,’ he says. ‘But everyone has to find a way of coming to terms with things. Racing is a dangerous sport and I face that through religion. I say a prayer.’

This week Scudamore will ride in the Cheltenham Festival and on Thursday he will sit astride Carvill’s Hill, the Arkle of the Nineties and the 5-4 favourite to win the Gold Cup. Probably the world’s best jockey, he recently rode his 1500th winner and has ridden a record-breaking 200 winners in one season. But this week is vital. For Scudamore has never won the Grand National or the Cheltenham Gold Cup. ‘You always think you are going to do better than you actually do.’

He has fallen thousands of times and even cracked his skull. His father, a top jockey, had his racing career cut short when he partially lost the sight of one eye. ‘It’s not something I like to think about. There are some bones I haven’t broken,’ Scudamore almost whispers. ‘Obviously, I’m frightened. I don’t want to hurt myself. The fear of death and permanent injury is always there. But I don’t go into races thinking, ‘I could die’.’ Just over a year ago, he broke his leg – again. Half his shin, he says, was dangling. ‘I lay there thinking, ‘Shit, I’m going to have to have it amputated’ . . . I’m very rude to ambulance men. It’s probably from my childhood, because my mother was so over-protective. She wouldn’t even let me bicycle down the road. If you fell over, she was always there and fussing – so I can’t stand ambulance men clucking over me.’

Scudamore has a starved look and a dry sense of humour. He isn’t weeny like flat race riders but is slight with brown eyes and what looks like a concave tummy. (He sometimes needs to weigh 10 stone, including a saddle.) He is also very softly spoken and often talks in parentheses and sentences that don’t finish.

He is racing’s Mr Nice Guy and considered a pillar of rectitude. He is delightful, sincere, quietly confident and unassuming. He also has a choirboy’s good looks and a famously good and stable marriage. So which deadly sin is he most attracted to? ‘Perhaps greed,’ he says. ‘No, lust.’ Which is surprising, considering his wholesome image.

He has been married to Marilyn for 12 years, since he was 21. He looks foxed when he tries to remember how old she is, eventually deciding she’s about five years older than he. Is he faithful? ‘Yes,’ he says, with a furrowed brow and a wringing of hands.

‘We don’t have the perfect marriage, though. It isn’t like one long honeymoon where I’m in a permanent state of love. Marriage is hard work. We scream at one another and sometimes don’t talk for a week. It’s hard for her with me always being the focus of attention, though it’s slightly easier now she runs her own company promoting jockeys. I’m very ambitious, so I must be very hard to be around. Take holidays, I can’t stand the idea of just lying on a beach. So she went to Barbados with some friend of hers. We try to live an open, mature life.

‘We work things out. If we don’t talk about things, then they brew up. She smokes and that upsets me and is the cause of arguments. We don’t always appreciate what we’ve got. The thing I want out of life is to educate my children. I have two lovely boys (aged nine and eight). It would be wrong of me to want more.’

His childhood has been described as idyllic. He was brought up on a small farm in Herefordshire and retains a slight West Country accent. ‘I was always very proud of my father, because he won the Grand National and the Gold Cup.’ Scudamore wrings his hands again, talking about the two wins that have so far eluded him. ‘He was a brave, honest and good jockey, so I looked up to him. I suppose that gave me my ambition. But I don’t feel I have to live up to him. There hasn’t been any pressure in that way.

‘My parents were so good, a wonderful couple who set the standards of right and wrong for me. I wasn’t spoilt. We didn’t live in luxury or have fast cars, but we had everything we wanted. Looking back, my childhood was very stable.’

Scudamore had an unremarkable academic career at Belmont Abbey, a minor (Catholic) public school. ‘A kindly and cheerful boy with a good sense of humour,’ his housemaster said in 1974 on a report that had a ‘very poor result’ in chemistry and a ‘weak performance’ in maths.

As a child, he used to pretend he was able do things before he had actually mastered them. ‘I always thought from the day that I first rode that I was the best jockey in the world.’ He was three years old. ‘I know it’s stupid, but I’ve always wanted to be the best. If someone criticises me, I find it hard to accept. You always believe you are the best.’ (His father is the only person from whom he accepts criticism and the two are still very close.) ‘I’m still a bad loser. Winning is a great high and losing is a real down. Racing gets me down. I know it shouldn’t. I’m not always happy. Sometimes I get really fed up.’

His mother, fearful lest he get hurt, never wanted him to go into racing. His first job was as an estate agent. But he had his first National Hunt win when he was just 20. ‘Whenever I go home, my mother still asks me when I’m going to get a proper job.’

He feels his upbringing was unfairly privileged. ‘It was very privileged and false. I’m not sure it’s right to be brought up in such a protected way,’ he says now. ‘Most people aren’t bought up like that nor do they go to all-boys schools.’

Because of his elitist background, when Scudamore left school he felt awkward with girls. ‘I left school at 17 without many female friends,’ he says. ‘I was always frightened of rejection.’

He does, however, enjoy meeting the Royals. The Princess Royal used to ride out from his yard. ‘Goodbye Ma’am,’ he said, as she left one day. Then his youngest son, Thomas, then only knee high to a jockey piped up: ‘Goodbye Mum.’ The Princess fixed him with an amused eye. ‘Thomas,’ she said, laughing, ‘I think you have ideas above your station.’

On another occasion, he sat next to the Queen Mother at a dinner of course upon course of a Roux brothers-prepared banquet. Typically, Scudamore was dieting, so he spent the evening picking at quails’ eggs. He doesn’t have a lavish lifestyle. He lives near Cheltenham in a house called Mucky Cottage, which is named after a horse. His trainer Martin Pipe (together they make the most successful team in racing) picks him up by helicopter in the summer. Otherwise he drives himself, around 50,000 miles a year in his Peugeot 605. He races six days a week, often leaving home at four in the morning.

He does a spot of gardening in his spare time. He thinks it would be naff for him to read Dick Francis. ‘I read him when I was a kid. Racing is nothing like Dick’s books.’ And he doesn’t think he looks like a Francis hero.

He admits to a turnover of £80,000. But later in the interview he says that was a ‘porky pie’. Because he doesn’t want a visit from the tax man? ‘Yes,’ he laughs. ‘And because I don’t think it’s good to boast about your earnings. I want to be a millionaire the same as the ordinary arse (his word for a non-rider), but it’s not a lifetime’s ambition.’

People go on about his retiring. He knows his racing years are limited and his nerve will not hold out forever. But he loves his way of life and its risk. ‘If you said to me a few years ago that I would ride 200 winners, I would have said, ‘I’ll then be the most famous jockey, my life will change. That will be it. The kids won’t cry and the missus won’t moan.’ But, in fact, it doesn’t change anything. I might win the Gold Cup on Thursday, but life won’t change. And I don’t want it to change.’

Volatile, fair and loyal personality who organises poetry readings in a Cork Street gallery and is the wife of ad man Maurice Saatchi. Versatile and competitive producer of high-brow plays. Entertaining and high-voltage career woman with supercharged emotions who was formerly on the board of Haymarket Publishing.

Such is the reputation of Josephine Hart, author of Damage, a novel about a middle-aged man’s (requited) erotic obsession with his son’s fiancee. Hart is dressed in black leggings, black Paco Rabanne mid-thigh jacket and flat black shoes, looking expensive, elegant and understated. ‘I break out sometimes and buy red or occasionally green. But I have a strong reaction to colour. If I wear red too much, I get too excitable.’ Black soothes and controls her, making her feel calm. ‘You can fade away in black in a way you can’t with other colours.’

She carries a horse-nosebag handbag, black of course, which contains a thumb-sized book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. ‘Poetry is an absolute necessity in my life. I read it certainly every day,’ she says later, in her very Irish accent. ‘I need it, really need it. I would be bereft without it.’ She’s also wearing a gold ring that looks like the Sydney Opera House, with a diamond in each roof, plus three strands of grey Chanel beads. She has rich brown hair, sharp eyes, thin lips and a strong, determined face. ‘I think I’m fairly fit’ – she swims most days – ‘I move everywhere very fast. If it were possible I’d run, but it looks too embarrassing in the street.’

She wears little make-up save beetroot lipstick. So what of her face? ‘I think it’s a big face (means big features) – but not a pretty face, and not a fashionable one. I think it looks strong and open. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m terribly open.’

She feels very Irish. ‘Yeats says, ‘I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart’. There’s tremendous intensity that comes from being Irish and a passion for words.’ She waxes eloquently and lengthily on the subject, very Irishly.

Here is a formidable woman who lingers in the mind long after the meeting, possibly because her words seem so wise. She comes across as persistent, single-minded and with an iron will: a survivor; and an intense, complex and deep character who appears terribly tough on the surface. She also has an elegant mind – is passionately literary, erudite and interesting – and shows her convent education in a high-mindedness, impetus to self-improvement and moral rectitude.

‘It’s terribly difficult to know yourself,’ she says, putting her hand on her chin in a gesture of self-comfort. ‘It’s a very difficult journey between the necessity of finding out who you are because it’s crucial in your relationships with other people, and self-obsession.

‘All my responsibility in life, I believed, was to behave correctly, fulfil my duty and save my soul.’ Has she managed that to date? ‘I think I’m very dutiful.’

She has spent years trying to work herself out, trying to decide when to lay ghosts to rest. ‘I wouldn’t say that finally living in the here and now is something that I have fully managed to do.’

Her 16-year-old brother and nine-year-old sister died within months of each other when she was 17 – one from illness and the other in an accident. She lived in an extremely enclosed world (‘I never went anywhere. For me to go to Dublin was a major thing’) and handled the pain in a very intense way while her parents ‘almost died of grief’. ‘I feel I have lived two such different lives and integrating them both is very difficult.’ Does she feel like two different people? ‘To some extent.’

She once stopped training to be an actress because she felt she had to delve into herself too much. ‘It requires such psychological courage and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that. I know I would have cracked up.’ Is she damaged? ‘I am full of sadness, definitely. The life was certainly damaged. But I don’t know whether my soul was damaged beyond repair. I don’t think so because a lot of extraordinary insights came out of it.’

What goes on in her soul? ‘The same as that which should go on in anybody’s soul. The question of how you live a good life.’ She joins her hands together and rests her chin on them, looking as if she is praying. Materially, she lives a good life. Her father ran a garage, while M, as she calls her husband, is not short of a bob or two. ‘That has been the most irrelevant thing in the world to me. It’s hard to describe the emphasis on the spiritual that I grew up with. The things that were interesting were poetry and how well read you were, not whether you had a car.’ In Damage, the narrator is a man. How easy was it for her to be a man? ‘Hideously easy,’ she laughs, an infectious laugh that hits the ceiling. ‘I was so shocked. I felt in total symbiosis with him – and what that says about me as a woman, I really don’t know.’

She views her sexuality – and she’s paraphrasing Tom Stoppard in the Real Thing here – as the great unplayed card. ‘In every other area of your life, people can see how you are, see your clothes, listen to what you say. But a person’s sexual nature, their behaviour in sexual matters, is the great secret of people’s psychology. An extraordinary thing . . . the power of sex . . . it’s majesty . . .’ she says. ‘It has a terrifying ability to throw us out of synch in relation to everything else . . . It is an intense experience . . . I really feel it is an extraordinary, the most extraordinary event in life.’

So how would she describe herself? ‘I have a very disciplined surface and underneath a reasonably cheerful nature. The two are integrating more now.’ She talks in an emphatic way, cutting the air with her voice and speaking aggressively with her hands as if she were chopping meat in the air. ‘I’m emotional, passionate (she gobbles the word as if she doesn’t want to say it out loud). I think I’m fair. When I examine my behaviour every day, I ask myself whether I’ve been fair.

‘It’s terribly easy to be harsh towards others and soft to oneself. And it’s easy for me to be incredibly loving, just as it is easy for me to go pow (she punches her palm with her fist) phew like that when I am angry. My nature is one that would go like that whack (she hits her hand) if I let it.’

It was said that she often bred fear rather than affection in her colleagues. ‘That was a long time ago. I was terribly upset when I read that. But I think it was probably true.’ She thinks perhaps people found her persistence, forthright opinions and intense concentration disturbing. She does come over as very hard. ‘I can accept that. I can completely sympathise with someone who doesn’t know me thinking, ‘God, what’s going to stop this person?’ ‘ she says, her face visibly softening for the first time.

‘I have a determination based on having to decide to survive, not financially but psychologically. But I don’t think I’m hard at all, not at all. I wish I were much tougher. People I love can do absolutely anything with me. My children complain that I’m too soft.’

Jeremy Guscott has a 42in chest, an outside leg of 43 inches and cheveux noirs. It says so on his model’s Z card. On one side of it, there is a photo of the hunk playing rugby; on the other, he sits, legs astride on a chair, while a blonde with a plunging neckline stands behind him with her legs apart.

‘I wouldn’t say I have the typical look of a male model because I’m rather short in the legs and long in the back,’ he says, sitting forward and gazing straight on out of melting eyes. ‘I’ve been told I look like Bruce Oldfield, but often I think I look too serious.’

Such work may seem, traditionally, rather a sissy sideline for England’s rugby union star as the team prepares to take on Wales at Twickenham on Saturday – but he’s happy.

Actually, he can hardly believe his luck. Just over two years ago he was working as a brickie, and a lot of his friends still do. But he is now famous for his graceful and brilliant athleticism, for his surprising attacks and resilient defences.

He presents himself in a calm and confident manner. But as a teenager, he was expelled from Ralph Allen comprehensive in Bath just before taking his CSEs.

‘I can look back on it these days and laugh,’ he says. ‘I also look back with anger. I got suspended for things like answering back to teachers, being obstinate and totally ignoring them, walking out of classrooms or smoking. At other schools, you would’ve just got detention.’ He smiles defiantly.

He is slim and moves in a feline way. The first time I met him informally, he appeared gentle, disarmingly charming. But in interview he is defensive, petulant even. Talking to him on some subjects is like arguing with an errant teenager. You quickly realise that this is a self-protective attitude.

Take the question of mini Guscotts. This week it was revealed that he is going to become a father.

‘You said you were going to get to work on having children straight away after the World Cup,’ I said. He gives a (rare) genuine laugh. ‘There’s no evidence of this, none at all,’ he says, distantly. ‘But my wife and I are both 100 per cent sure that we want children.’

He married Jayne, his sweetheart of five years, 20 months ago. It’s a mixed marriage and he met her after she kicked him at a local disco. (She insists it was her friend.) In similar fashion, his father came from Jamaica and had a mixed marriage to a woman he ran over on his bicycle. ‘I’ve not known anything different from a mixed marriage,’ says Jeremy. His maternal grandfather disapproved so strongly of his parents marrying that he refused to see Jeremy until he was three. ‘I’ve not had any problems with racism,’ says Jeremy, swallowing hard. He did, however, get called Sambo at school. ‘Kids get called Four Eyes and Fatty. You’re not going to get a reaction out of me, Caroline.’

We’re sitting in the tiny, bare sitting-room of his terraced house on the outskirts of Bath with his female manager, who is there to help him feel comfortable. There are some reproduction sepia photographs of Bath on the walls. It is a bland environment, with decor that is devoid of personality. He’s done a little magazine modelling and recently walked his first catwalk as the guest-of-honour model at Oxfam’s 50th birthday celebrations, in front of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

‘He felt really uncomfortable in that environment. He was polite but couldn’t wait to go,’ says a friend.

I ask about his modelling career. Is he a sex symbol? A matinee idol? ‘Oh, thanks.’ He gives a weak laugh, but the clothes he wears today could have come straight from one of his mail-order catalogue sessions. M&S camel double-breasted jacket, Blazer shirt and trousers, and camel suede brogues – this is the flash look that has just got him into Esquire magazine’s Best Dressed Men list.

Well, does he think he’s sexy? ‘I don’t think I’m sexy,’ he says, curtly. Or good looking? ‘I’m not being pressed on that.’ Do women chase after him? ‘Not that I’ve noticed. You just get the odd letter through the post that suggests they’d like more than a signed photograph.’

This is just a sideline. He actually works nine to five in the sales department of British Gas. ‘I’m in the housing development department, dealing with getting gas to villages that haven’t already got it.’ Somehow, he manages to make his tone quite menacing. ‘It’s quite wide and varied, and I enjoy going out and talking to people,’ he says, talking like a beauty queen. ‘I wouldn’t pursue another career. My future is with British Gas.’ He has, of course, been offered around £1 million to become a professional rugby league player. But he says he’s not interested in money – his ambition is to be a manager in British Gas marketing. Of course. But the real reason comes out later. With rugby union, he can come and go as he pleases. ‘I don’t think I could cope with the restrictions of being a professional. I didn’t cope very well with being told what to do when I was at school. I’m still not that good with people who order me around and tell me what to do. I wouldn’t be the boss.’

In his early days, his coaches reckoned he had a talent for the game but a suspect temperament. Is he still difficult? ‘Can be.’ And with an attitude problem? ‘I don’t think so.’ Nor does he think he’s too big for his own boots. ‘I still have the same friends I’ve grown up with. When you’re with the squad, you can’t be seen to be big-headed and nobody is.’ He concedes that he is aggressive. ‘I’m not afraid to tell people what I think of them,’ says this 26-year-old. ‘It’s never been a problem.’ His parents live 100 yards away. ‘Family, friends and community are important to Jeremy,’ says a friend. ‘He’s very deep-rooted.’ His father came from Jamaica 30 years ago and worked at the Avon Rubber Company before taking voluntary redundancy and becoming a hospital porter. His mother has been a teacher for 10 years.

Gary, his brother, is two and half years younger. ‘I’m always taking the mickey out of my mother and saying Gary was the favourite child,’ says Jeremy. Their father never used to let them out to play and get mucky. ‘We laugh about it now. But he wouldn’t ever let us go out and play and get dirty.’ Was his father too strict? ‘He was very strict.’

But, he says, with an almost quizzical tone, that it was a happy home. What went on in his childhood that led to him act in such a bolshie fashion at school? ‘I can’t think of anything. I can’t think why I did it.’ He clears his throat defensively.

One thing’s for sure – on Saturday, he’ll be boss. And he’ll be able to go out and play and get dirty.

I had a wonderful childhood and wonderful parents,’ says Sarah Brightman. ‘We lived in a four-bedroom house in Berkhampstead that my father built. I went to a stage boarding school when I was 11 and I was unhappy there. I remember my father saying to me, ‘Make up your own mind. You can either come home and do something else, or if you’re ambitious, you’ll have to stay on at the school’.

‘In the end, I stayed on because there wasn’t a stage school in our area. But to be honest, I would have preferred to have remained at home. I loved my family so much that I didn’t want to be away.’

So Sarah, the eldest of six children, went to private school though, in the early days, her sisters were sent to grammar schools. ‘They went private as my father’s business got better. He started from simple beginnings and did very well for himself and his company. We had a good lifestyle.’ She also says she inherited a disposition to insomnia from her father. ‘I don’t sleep well because I’m always worrying about the next thing.’ (She looks radiantly healthy, bright-eyed and rested.) ‘I think I’m one of those people who can survive on four hours’ sleep a night. My father is like that.’

Only days after Sarah spoke to me, her property developer father, 57 year-old Grenville, was found dead in his fume-filled Golf GTi. His marriage to her mother, Paula, ended five years ago and he is thought to have been having a complicated romance and business losses. It is significant that it is to her mother that she goes to stay in her spare time, on the south coast. It is also significant that she told me how important her ‘wonderful’ family had been to her in the 18 months since she was divorced from her second husband, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Despite her father’s tragic death, she showed up this week to play her part of Rose (a woman who has lost in love) in her ex-husband’s Aspects of Love. Work provides a safe haven for her. ‘I can lose myself completely in my characters,’ she said last week, kicking her leg at an imaginary football, as she did through much of our time together. ‘I love escaping. I’m not saying that one wants to escape from the day, but it’s lovely to be someone else.’

In similar fashion, playing Rose helped her to overcome the break-up of her marriage. ‘It was quite therapeutic. If you work and have something that you can cling onto, that is the best thing you can do. Work is the one thing I know I do excellently. It gives me stability.’ She talks in a guileless fashion and presents herself like a little girl.

She says that since becoming single, she has become stronger. ‘I am opening up and becoming stronger as a person and a performer. I’m becoming stronger because I’ve had a lot of personal things to deal with. I’m not going to go into them, because they’re obvious. But I’ve also had to go through a lot of barriers career-wise.’

Married since the age of 18 (first time to a band manager called Andrew Graham-Stewart), she has coped well. ‘I’ve always been very reliant on a man. But I’ve handled it really well. I’ve not stopped working since I got divorced, I’ve lived in another country (America) and I’ve dealt with things for the first time by myself. I haven’t had anyone to go to and say, ‘I’m scared about making this decision, what do you think?’ ‘

Does she still feel hurt about Lloyd Webber? ‘I never felt hurt.’ Seriously? ‘No, I never felt hurt.’

‘He went off with another woman and you didn’t feel hurt,’ I say. ‘I have never felt hurt and I’m being truthful.’

She says they work together happily today. ‘There aren’t really any negative things to say.’ So why did he leave her? ‘You’ll have to ask him.’ She laughs. ‘He obviously had his reasons and did it.’ She appears incredibly accepting. ‘I don’t think one has any choice in life.’ He settled on her a sum that she won’t disclose, but estimates have been in the region of £6 million. ‘I live off my earnings and I wake up like everybody else, panicking in the night because I have bills to pay.’ Curiouser and curiouser. Why does she feel the need to panic in the night when she has some tidy sum stashed away? ‘Because I like to live in a real situation. I can’t do my job unless I’m in it with everybody else and I know what they’re thinking. How can you go into a meeting and negotiate when your head is in Timbuktu?’

She has left behind a lavish lifestyle. She will tell you how it didn’t change her. (‘I wasn’t any different.) And how she would do things like go to the White House or meet the Prime Minister. But nowadays she lives a quieter life.

One of the things that helped her make this change was her faith. ‘How am I going to say this without sounding cranky?’ She sometimes chooses her words carefully and talks in a circumspect fashion, as if she fears being stitched up. ‘My mother and two sisters are Catholic. Religiously, I haven’t anything very strong in my background. But I feel a very strong force within myself, almost like an instinct which I follow.’ She places her hand on her stomach. ‘It is warm and it is bright. I suppose you could call that God. I know that what keeps me going is this strong, warm force inside me. ‘I think you have to be very humble about what you want to achieve in life, because it’s not our decision,’ she says. ‘I don’t say I’ll leave everything to fate, because I certainly wouldn’t. But there is a fair amount of that. You can plan your life for the next 20 years, but there is no way it is going to go that way.’

When she talks about her split from Lloyd Webber, she talks about such cosmic forces again. ‘There are forces and things that happen that are completely beyond our control. Relationships aren’t like business and you can’t treat them as such. If someone really truly loves you and you’re just yourself with them and not forcing anything and it is right, it will be there forever. But if it’s not right, it’s naturally not going to work.’ She now lives in a two-bedroom rented flat in central London. She has simple tastes. ‘I’ve got the basics. I don’t need anything else. I don’t own a property anywhere in the world.’

She is 31 years old. ‘I don’t mind if I never get married again,’ she says. ‘And that’s not to do with being cross or anything. I don’t have a particular boyfriend. I’m dating lots of men. At first, I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know what to do. But you don’t have to do anything. You just have to be yourself.

‘I badly need people. We all do. I mean ‘no man is an island unto himself’.’ She leans back on the fleur-de-lis cushion in a hospitality room in the bowels of the Prince of Wales Theatre. ‘We all need help and advice. But inside, I am very, very strong and quite tough and I know what I want. I can be very independent, as long as I have my friends and family.’ Ask her about having children and she shrieks with laughter and starts to kick her leg in a very agitated way. ‘I come from a family of six, the youngest of whom is only 13. So I don’t particularly have any great maternal instincts. I’ve seen it’s jolly hard. I’ve seen my mother bring up all those children without any help. It’s tough.

‘In a way, they do drain your emotions and I feel that I wouldn’t be able to do my work as well if I had babies. If I had children, I’d probably give up all my time and stop work.’

It is unlikely she will stop work soon. She is driven. If she has two hours when the phone isn’t ringing, she starts to pace the flat. ‘Even if I switch on the television and watch a film, my mind’s grinding about why something is such and such a way at work and which camera shot would be good.’

She says she feels like the lion in The Wizard of Oz. ‘The one who has no courage. I’ve always felt like that since I was small. I’ve always felt like I’ve got a hurdle to overcome and often I don’t know whether I’m going to make it. There are all sorts of little things in life that I am scared of. And I am fearful of people.

‘But I’m also very happy within myself and feel quite strongly within myself at the moment.’ She does a double take on the last few words. ‘I’m healthy. I have a lovely family. And I have been given a talent that I feel grateful for.’

So why did she flinch on the last few words? Is it because she always thinks there’s something nasty around the corner? ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs her shoulders, little girl like. ‘Maybe.’

Pat Booth was once extremely promiscuous and slept with men because she thought it old-fashioned not to. ‘I think I have a very healthy sexual appetite. I’ve seldom met a man who hasn’t appealed to me.’ This East End girl turned model, owner of boutiques in the Sixties, photographer, journalist and now steamy best-selling novelist thinks of herself as having a man’s mind in a female body. ‘I often see men as sexual objects.’ The place she really likes to be more than anywhere else in the entire world is in bed. ‘If someone said, ‘What would you like to do for the rest of your life?’ I’d say, ‘Stay in bed – alone’.’ She laughs. And what would she do? ‘I’d read.’

She has that look that models had in the late Sixties. She is beautiful, with big eyes and perfect teeth. Her reading tastes are eclectic and run from Russian classics to pop US religious leader Marianne Williamson, but she wouldn’t be at all averse to reading her own work in bed. ‘I’m always surprised that I’m so good,’ says the woman who once said that it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t become extremely successful and believes defiantly in her own artistic merit.

She has just published Miami, an airport novel about the super-rich, sex, models, glamour and power. The book opens with sex: ‘Christa was an animal.’ The book ends with sex: ‘His hands cupped her tensed buttocks. He drew her into him, plastering her soft wetness against his face.’ Such heavings might appear to sit oddly with Booth’s Catholicism. But her priest, who reads her avidly, once told her that it was all right for her to write thus since nobody in her books actually enjoyed sex. ‘I thought they were enjoying it when I wrote the scenes,’ says Booth, in the voice of a strong, confident woman. ‘It never occurred to me that the woman wasn’t enjoying it.’ Like the women in her books, she takes control of her life. She has been married to her psychiatrist husband, Garth, since 1976, when she was 19. They took time off for ‘bad behaviour’ for three years in her late twenties. ‘We decided to split up and ended up fooling around. He didn’t want me to work. I was Left-wing and he was Right. We used to row about Vietnam and the Israeli war, which is so meaningful when you are young.’

She has been faithful to him since. ‘But that is not particularly important to me,’ says this youthful 45-year-old, wearing a jacket painted with the names of her husband and children. ‘I certainly wouldn’t break up a marriage because of it. If I found my husband was being unfaithful, that wouldn’t concern me.’

She has two children, Orlando and Camellia. She waited until she was 34 to have Orlando, and her daughter is adopted. ‘Why? Because I er, er, well, er, my Catholicism. I, I, (she stumbles) had had an abortion when I was younger and came to the stage of thinking that was deeply immoral. So I adopted for that reason.’ To compensate? ‘Yeah.’

Booth says she had been financially supporting several girls who had no alternative but to abort. ‘I didn’t want any more children. I would never have adopted. But one of the girls was 12 and her mother wouldn’t take her back into the house with the baby.’ So she adopted Camellia. ‘To cut a long story short, it has worked out really well.’ She appears unfazed by nearly everything else I ask her, answering without pause.

She takes her religion very seriously. ‘I go to church three or four times a week. I’m very comfortable in church. I feel most at home there.’ She is seeking peace. ‘It’s the only time I am in tune with my core’ – she gestures as if holding her essence in a tennis ball against her chest – ‘with my inner voice and moral imperatives. I very much believe in one’s spirituality.’

She hates confession. ‘I’m just so fearful of it. So fearful of that box. I can’t forgive my own sin – and the confessional is somewhere you are given dispensation.’ It is sinful not to accept dispensation. ‘I am basically a complete and utter sinner, but I don’t think we are put here to be perfect.’ The words seem odd issuing from the former model with the sun-bleached hair.

Booth was bought up in the East End. Her mother ran a jellied-eel shop and her father was a professional boxer. ‘It was a matriarchal environment.’ It was also an impoverished upbringing. ‘There was no comfort or home cooking. I used to be very fearful of poverty. Frightened of being cold again and repeating the misery of my childhood. For the first time in my life I now feel so divorced from such circumstances that I no longer feel frightened of poverty.’ She has homes in London, Palm Beach and New York, but the legacy of her childhood, she says, is seen in the monastic, austere interiors she creates.

The early years were solitary, with her only sister 15 years older. A background that she says made her self-sufficient and single-minded. She left school at 16, refused to serve again in the eel shop, did a secretarial course, and then got her break as a model by working for Norman Parkinson on Queen Magazine. A toughie and a survivor, she didn’t have time to wonder whether she was going to fail. ‘I know what I want all the time. All I want is my own way.’

She is married to a psychiatrist, but would never consider seeing an analyst. ‘That would be complete self-indulgence. I am totally and utterly against it. Psychiatrists deal with those who are mentally sick with one of the five major illnesses treatable with drugs. There are some seriously ill people, I mean sick people,’ she says, a tone almost of dislike in her voice. ‘There are tragically sick people, of whom my sister is one, funnily enough.’ Her sister developed schizophrenia 12 years ago. ‘It has had no effect on my life. She was diagnosed when my father died.’

The only thing that makes her fearful, she says, is weakness. ‘I’m not vulnerable at all. I don’t feel at all vulnerable.’ If she does feel a hint of the v word coming on, she attributes it to chemical imbalances. ‘I think my adrenaline is not pumping properly. I don’t believe in vulnerability. I don’t indulge it. If I feel it for a second, I do something about it. I work out (which she does every day). I get rid of it very fast.’

The writer Margaret Drabble lives in a Hampstead house and Michael Holroyd, the husband to whom she is devoted, lives in Ladbroke Grove. It is an arrangement that London’s top-drawer literary couple have maintained since their secret wedding in 1982. But now she wants to move in with him. When they entertain, they sleep at her house; when they go to the airport, they spend the night at his. ‘We speak every day,’ says Drabble of Holroyd, the enigmatic man of letters who received a record advance of £625,000 for his biography of George Bernard Shaw. ‘He’s coming to dinner tonight, tomorrow I’ll spend alone…’

Drabble, 53, is an intriguing woman. ‘Occasionally I dream about being naked in the front row of the stalls. Sometimes I’m falling off a cliff or missing an aeroplane,’ she says, cupping her face in her hand. ‘I have a recurrent dream of standing up to give a lecture and I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

She also has a famously frosty relationship with her elder sister, AS Byatt, the Booker prize-winning novelist and critic. There have been periods of potent rivalry when they haven’t spoken, and they refuse to read each other’s books. ‘I was,’ says Drabble, ‘terribly upset when she became very difficult about me.’ Normally exceedingly reluctant to discuss their relationship, she talks later at length about one of the literary world’s most famous tiffs.

Drabble became famous 30 years ago, aged just 23, with A Summer Bird Cage. Once compared to George Eliot, she is currently writing a biography of Angus Wilson, has written novels, screenplays, biographies and edited The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She created a new kind of domestic novel but now writes with ‘black humour about post-industrial society’. Her recent work had critical drubbings. ‘I’ve been around too long and was doing too nicely and they don’t like that.’

She is wearing a sensible black suit, brown shoes and greyish tights and has large penetrating blue eyes, a clear and unmade-up face and brown bob. She is equanimous with an outer confidence, a face that expresses little emotion and a plummy middle-class accent with no trace of her Sheffield roots. We are talking in her Edwardian redbrick house, in a sitting room with one white wall and the rest in 20-year-old William Morris wallpaper, with books everywhere.

We return to the subject of marriage. Drabble and Holroyd spent most of their courtship behind the wheel of a car – Holroyd allegedly teaching her to drive. Why do they have such an unconventional relationship? ‘Both of us absolutely love being alone and we enjoy one another’s company enormously. So we’ve struck up a way of life which allows us to do both. ‘I didn’t want a relationship that was threatening or confining. He didn’t expect me to change or alter my work pattern. So many relationships have a bad effect on both parties. You see them getting nastier or cosier – cosiness is bad, too. For us, every week is different. This week we’re apart two nights. But we can always ring and say, ‘I want to be alone tonight,’ or, ‘Why don’t you come to supper?”

The last of her three children (she has two sons and a daughter) left home last year, so she feels there is no further need for her house. She wants to finish off Angus Wilson and then move into Holroyd’s place next year.

‘We’ll carry on just the same. I absolutely have to have my own space. We’d have to have separate bits of the house. I’ll say things like, ‘I’d like to spend this evening on my own with a whisky and an omelette.’ ‘I think marriage is a dangerous, dangerous relationship, full of potential destruction of personality. People aren’t meant to be together 24 hours a day. The form of relationship we have seems much more natural.’ Are they faithful to each other? ‘It’s not a question that I would talk about,’ she says, sounding strained.

Sex is something that she regards as destructive as well as agreeable. ‘It can be consuming and obsessional and make you very unhappy. I think it’s an extremely important part of life that can cause a great deal of misery. Sexual jealousy is a terrifying feeling. Sex has caused me misery at certain times in my life. I was unnaturally nervous about it when I was young, and then terribly keen to get on with it when I was 18.’

Drabble’s father was a circuit judge who was frequently away and remote, and her mother an English teacher who was aggressive and difficult. The second child of four, she went to a Quaker school in York, read English at Cambridge and got a double first, acted with the RSC for two seasons and then started writing. Marriage to actor Clive Swift lasted 15 years. ‘I was quite fiery and would lose my temper as a child. My mother and father were depressives and we all got depressed. I had quite serious bouts of depression. I used to cry a lot. My mother had a really foul temper and was always telling me off. You just weren’t allowed to make mistakes. She was from a working-class background, so you had to get on in life. ‘I had a most terrible stammer as a child. I could hardly speak. It comes back when I’m tired or cross.’ It also seems to happen when conversation hits an emotional nerve.

So what of her relationship with her sister? ‘She’s written about how she hated me, and I’ve written about how I admired her,’ replies Drabble, her voice rising. ‘When we were little, we had just an ordinary sibling irritation. But things got worse when we became published writers. ‘I used to tag around after Sue (as she calls her) when we were children. I wanted to do everything she wanted to do, which must have been maddening. I published first, when I was very young – which must have been terribly annoying for her.

‘We both became wary of reading one another’s work, worried that we were using the same kind of material. I forced myself to read one volume of her short stories which, unbeknown to me, came up for an award. I found it an unpleasant and disturbing experience reading about my own father.’ How did she feel when AS Byatt won the Booker Prize? ‘I was delighted for her – I don’t let my books go in for it, but of course I felt a twinge of envy…

‘We get on much better now than we did. She had this tragic period in her life after her son was killed. But now for the first time in many years she’s actually enjoying life.’

What about the time when they refused to speak? ‘It wasn’t as obvious as that,’ she stammers. ‘We just didn’t go out of our way to see each other.’ Does she feel animosity towards her? ‘No. I feel flattered and honoured if she calls me. I’m still the little sister. I feel it is wrong to bother her. I’m actually quite frightened of her because she is older and cleverer than me.’

As Byatt is certainly older; but Drabble is extremely clever. She also appears dour, but laughs. And wise, enquiring, sometimes priggish but likable. ‘I suffer from doubt most of the time. Doubt of myself as a writer, cook, housewife and human being,’ she says, steadily. ‘I feel flawed and faulty as a human being.’

Perky, impish and nutty Academy award-winning actress and sister of Warren Beatty. Self-centred, single-minded and charming author of Dance While You Can who talks about her past lives and is into the occult. Whither the real Shirley MacLaine?

On the cover of her book, with black boots and lots of black leg, she looks like a happy hooker. But today she’s wearing violet sweater, jeans and cowboy-style shoes. She appears youthful and casual and gives me a force 10 handshake. ‘I like to wear loose, comfortable things,’ she says in an accent that is mid-Atlantic, nasal and with a twinge of southern. ‘I don’t like my legs to get cold, so I always cover them.’

She doesn’t think her legs as pretty as people say. ‘They look much better in black stockings with heels. I look much better nude than I do dressed.’ In the best of all possible worlds, would she go around naked? ‘Yeah. Nude with heels and a nice pair of earrings,’ she laughs. She says her garb gives the impression that she doesn’t care about what she wears, ‘and that if I do care, I’m not that good at it.’

She has red hair, slightly wispy at the back, eyes that were made in heaven, and fuchsia lips that have been very painted on. Close up, her cheeks show their crinkles. But she looks damn good and has had only two hours sleep.

‘Physically I’m heavier than I’d like to be. By 75 pounds.’ (Huge cackle.) ‘My ideal body was the way Twiggy used to look. I’d love to have a size 4 figure.’ She doesn’t like the loose flesh on her tummy or the ‘lovehandles’ on her back. ‘I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror backwards.’

She dyes her hair because it’s salt and pepper grey. ‘I don’t like that.’ But she’s happy with her looks. ‘Yeah. But I’ve never thought of myself as particularly pretty. I guess I’m kinda easy on the eyes.’ Her own eyes look both lively and sad.

She has decorated herself with a necklace on which hangs an ancient Buddhist symbol of a spiritual performer, and she has four earrings in each ear. ‘I’d have 12 if I had enough room. I’d put one in my nose, and one in my teeth if I could.’ She’s hindered only by the thought of the pain. A forceful personality, she has a very strong presence, and a humour in which, surprisingly, she sends herself up. She is hugely absorbed by her own character. The things she says often look cooky in print, but she doesn’t feel that way in real life. She’s also very earthy and friendly to the hotel staff. I liked her.

‘Jesus, how would I describe myself? I’ve written seven books, it’s taken 15 years and you want a nickel of crack? (A thumbnail sketch.)’ She then describes herself seamlessly. ‘I’m curious, impatient, focused, wilful, vulnerable, don’t like people to be afraid of me – some people are, but that’s their problem. Sometimes I can be detached, I don’t suffer fools gladly at all, don’t like small talk – sometimes my big mouth is too much for other people – very open-minded, judgmental, like to laugh, love slapstick humour, not very acquisitive.’ Phew.

Although she seems to convey the opposite in the interview, she says she cares deeply about what people think of her and that she tailors herself to elicit a pleasing response. What doesn’t she like about herself? ‘My impatience and judgmental-ness.’

She has written about her inner balance, peace and harmony in cosmic terms. (A quick read of Dance While You Can, reveals much psychobabble and pretentious tosh.) Where does she want to end up with all her personal growth? ‘I want to be able to meditate in peace at the drop of an eyelid.’ Her face looks stern, as it does mostly, but that’s because she’s concentrating.

She reckons her voice is getting lower as she becomes wiser. ‘I think a high voice is probably a sign of tension.’ She’s had a long time to get it right. In her previous lives, she has been a model for Toulouse-Lautrec and a maidservant for Nefertiti. ‘A really important one was on the Steppes in Mongolia. How do I know? I just feel it.’ Is she coming back again? ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll try Venus next time.’

This time round she’s 57 years old. ‘I’m glad that I never have to be young and insecure and conflicted again because I get happier as I get older. But I think something new and big and transformational and transcendental is about to happen to me. I don’t know what it is. Crewwwfff, crewwfff,’ she says, not for the first time making a strange noise through her nose in the style of someone who has just snorted cocaine. Does she do drugs? ‘I had one joint once and I stared at the test pattern on the TV for 15 hours.’ She hates anyone taking anything personality-altering and attributes her sinus problems to the hotel’s air conditioning.

In the book, she has put sex behind her. But now she has changed her mind. Where exactly does she now stand on sex? ‘Very rarely do I stand. (Laughs). It’s not as fulfilling!’ Professionally, she says, women in their 50s are no longer perceived as sexual beings. And personally? ‘I just had two years of . . . well, I wasn’t purposefully abstaining, sex just gave me up and it gave me an opportunity to have relationships with people without that sexual pressure.’

Does she think she’s sexy? ‘Yeah. I’m not as promiscuous as I used to be. It was fun, and I wasn’t as promiscuous as the word would imply. I was just promiscuous in relation to my upbringing. I’ve had a lot of lovers, but I’ve only had one at a time – it was serial monogamy.’

How many lovers? ‘I dunno. I wouldn’t even like to get into the counting of it.’ How would she define her sex appeal? ‘I’m spontaneous and childlike.’ She has piled her plate high with food and tucks in unselfconsciously, even eating a crumb off her jumper.

Is she eccentric? ‘Yeah’ – enthusiastic – ‘not because of my beliefs, but because of my lifestyle.’ I say she’s seen as cranky because of her mysticism. ‘People don’t see me as loopy here. Or, that’s not what comes out in the Press.’

Does she always need to be the centre of attention? ‘No. In fact most of the people I am with are much more theatrical’ – she is talking through a mouth full of food – ‘I like to be the woodwork. I’m shy – that’s my natural personality. I’m afraid of being judged, that’s why I don’t like to be the centre of attention.’

And is she self-absorbed? ‘Umm,’ she pauses, for the first time, ‘not really. I like to be centred in myself, some people would call that ‘self-centred’ or ‘self-absorbed’, and I’d say ‘fair enough’. If I’m not centred in myself, I’m not happy.’

And an egomaniac? ‘No,’ she says, with certainty. ‘I don’t have much of an ego. I’m always concerned, overly concerned, about the other person’s point of view. I’m basically a dancer and dancers don’t have ego.’ Dancers, she says, have will. ‘I am ruthlessly wilful. I won’t hurt anybody if I can avoid it, but I will certainly fix things so that what I want happens. But I’m not egomaniacal.’

Perhaps the accusation is levelled at her because much of her work is a tribute to herself. She has written seven volumes of autobiography and starred in a television drama about herself, written, of course, by herself. ‘That’s a search. It’s like I’m looking for who I am. Someone egomaniacal is already damned sure.’ Has she found out who she is? ‘No, only in parts.’