A Matter of Principle

Jana Wendt has conducted her share of difficult and confronting interviews with public figures during her television career, but rather than rehashing old encounters for this book, she spoke afresh to thirteen people, naming each interview after a principle the subject nominated, or one that ‘seemed to me to most obviously propel the thinking and attitudes of the person in question’.

She doesn’t explain how she chose her subjects, and it’s hard to discern a common thread. Showbiz people – Charlotte Rampling (‘Freedom’) and Rove McManus (‘Loyalty’) rub shoulders with politicians such as Richard Armitage (‘Dependability’) and Joschka Fischer (‘Curiosity’). There are writers (David Malouf, Robert Hughes) and artists (photographer Bill Henson and architect Frank Gehry); feminist Camille Paglia, war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, swimming champion Shane Gould and Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty; and Syrian psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, who has brought a fatwa down on her head by pursuing a campaign against Islam. The one thing most seem to share is a thoughtful, non-dogmatic intelligence – one exception being Sultan, who ‘ironically … has the certainty and zeal of a new convert, but a convert to humanism’.