THEY are all dead: the feisty Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and her 14 interviewees — prominent amongst them Henry Kis­singer, King Hussein of Jordan, Yasser Arafat, Mrs Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Cypriot president Archbishop Makarios, and the Vietnamese freedom fighters Gen Giap and Nguyen Van Thieu. All that remains are their words, uttered during the often provocative, testy conversations she had with them, later published in her book Interview with History (1976).

Fallaci mistrusted history. She felt it was “a novel full of events” and second-hand ju­­dgements. She preferred modern reportage: “Today’s history is written the very moment it happens [.] It can be transmitted immediately through the press, radio, television.”

Fallaci, a consummate professional, taped every interview. Often though, these precautions were not enough. The tapes of her sessions with Israeli leader Golda Meir mysteriously disappeared from a locked hotel room in Rome. Col Qadhafi’s detailed mention of their contents made Fallaci suspect him of masterminding the theft. She transcribed her notes faithfully but found that some of her interviewees like Gen Giap wanted her to print only their version. She humoured Giap, and then........

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