However, I have read quite a few of its famous interviews with big-time writers. First, there were the fifteen collected in a Penguin paperback called ‘Writers at Work’, edited by Kay Dick in 1972. Then there are other odd ones I’ve come across in various anthologies or surveys of writers’ work. Of these, the one I remember best is Philip Larkin’s in ‘Required Writing’ (1983) where you can see the exact point he loses patience with the whole thing and just starts taking the piss.

This new selection comprises sixteen interviews of which three (Saul Bellow, T.S.Eliot and Ernest Hemingway) were in the 1972 Penguin. I don’t know whether to be satisfied or not that my response to them hasn’t changed much over the past thirty-five years. I still find Bellow an irritating, overblown figure. I don’t think I’ve ever finished one of his books (nor could I quite finish the interview here,) and I’m not surprised that Martin Amis regarded him almost as a surrogate father. He’s the only one of the sixteen who refused to answer questions about his daily writing routine, which is one of the things I most want to know about any writer.

It should be said here that these are not interviews where questions are answered immediately and spontaneously. In most cases they have been revised and even passed back and forth a few times between the parties involved. As the editor Philip Gourevitch points out in his introduction, ‘the interview as a genre of literature unto itself is a distinctly modern phenomenon.’ This is okay by me; I don’t want all the ums and ers, or to feel that a better expressed and more cogent thought was almost being reached if only more time had been taken.

This is a wonderfully entertaining book, which I’m sure I’ll be dipping into for years to come. Even the separate introductions to each interviewee are fun and most are accompanied by a facsimile page from a manuscript with the author’s notes and corrections scrawled all over it.

I can’t get enough of this apparent trivia. I love to find out what hours writers work, whether they use pencil or pen or just type it straight out, do they need silence or do they play music, and if so, what? I am fascinated to discover that Rebecca West, who seemed to regard most of her great contemporaries with a haughty iciness, found the very act of putting pen to paper ‘a nauseating process,’ and that for Joan Didion, whose favourite book is Conrad’s ‘Victory’, writing fiction is ‘a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread.’

There is less of a purely literary flavour to this volume than the 1972 collection. Screenwriter and director Billy Wilder sits easily with Jorge Luis Borges and Elizabeth Bishop, James M. Cain with Dorothy Parker.

The funniest pair are Borges and Kurt Vonnegut, whose account of being a POW in Dresden during the bombardment of 1945, (the basis of ‘Slaughterhouse Five’) is at once heart-breaking and hilarious. The most straightforward advice on getting the work done came, I thought, from Truman Capote, but the most illuminating interview of the lot, covering all the often fraught and painful stages of book production from initial idea to finished product, is with the editor Robert Gottlieb.

The ‘interview’ itself is a series of statements from various writers he has worked with, interspersed with his own accounts and observations. For anyone who wants to know what the literary trade involves, read this one first.

This is a nice, chunky paperback, one of those with the covers folded over, and is a joy simply to hold as a physical object. If you love reading about writers, their lives, loves, hates, habits and peculiarities as much as I do it will be a source of constant pleasure.

Two more volumes are promised. I can’t wait.