Peter Porter, who died on 23rd April 2010 at the age of 81, was one of the finest poets of the late 20th century. This interview was conducted in January 2003, and is published here for the first...

A celebrity of the 18th century, Horace Walpole divided polite society. Now the re-opening of his home and a show at the V&A will restore his reputation, says Duncan Fallowell

It's daring to confess your sins, but uncool to have regrets. Yet I'm teeming with them. Why, for instance, did I turn down the offer to be the lead singer of the Krautrock band Can?

Since winning the Turner prize in 2003 for his illustrated pottery, the transvestite Perry has become a pantomime figure of the British art scene. Is this just celebrity transgression, or something...

Once the most stylish bitch in the US media, Gore Vidal approaches his 80th birthday with his reputation in decline. And what of the novels?

Out of dereliction, St Petersburg is re-emerging as a great Russian city. The concrete of communism has peeled off to reveal a human logic in the streets, and the return of a belle époque atmosphere

A few years before he died I visited the historian enveloped in a deep, English silence in his home near Didcot. He opened up to me about those Hitler diaries, Europe versus America, Oxford gossip...

I used to like people. Now there are too many of them

The late Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia was an expert chronicler of Italy's moral anguish, and both an artist and politician

Neither great, nor original - Barbara Cartland, still the queen of romantic fiction