An Education: Inspiration for the film, scripted by Nick Hornby Book

Lynn Barber's true story is now a major film of the same name scripted by Nick Hornby. At 16 Lynn Barber was an ambitious schoolgirl working towards a place at Oxford when she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man in a sports car. So began a relationship that almost wrecked her life. Barber's fascinating memoir takes us beyond this bizarre episode revealing how it left her with an abiding mistrust of men which paradoxically led her to a promiscuous life-style at university until she met her husband-to-be. "An Education" tells how she went on to work for seven years at daring (for the times) men's magazine "Penthouse' before beginning her starry days as the Demon Barber - Britain's most entertaining and most feared interviewer. The book ends with an extraordinarily moving account of the early death of her husband. Her writing is refreshingly frank and funny.

When the journalist Lynn Barber was 16, she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man who drew up in his sports car - and her life was almost wrecked.