“CH: Why did you only interview women?

WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women!

CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment didn’t you?

WS: I was very mean to her. And of course you always regret it because I think in interviewing there’s a real sense of ‘did I have a successful bowel movement that morning’ kind of feeling about it isn’t there? You go in to interview someone and you’re constipated and you think they’re the worst person you’ve met and you go in to see them another day when your stomach is full of gaily coloured butterflies and you think they’re the best thing since sliced bread so you grow weary of that as an interviewer if you’ve got any wisdom – but at the same time if dyspepsia collides with something you perceive in the other person you just let rip.

The problem with interviewing, which is an aspect of our culture, is that there seems to be a licence to be psychically ruthless. It’s almost encumbent upon an interviewer to allow themselves the full traverse of the psychic rifle.”

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“Though I have never been able to get into Will Self’s fiction which I always experience as somewhat laboured, I found this collection of previously published magazine and newspaper essays, restaurant reviews and short features instant, engaging, thoughtful and provoking, insightful, often laugh out loud funny, subversive and full of humanity. From a review of an English Country Garden restaurant experienced on acid to Self interviewing JG Ballard via an essay on The Westway, if that sounds good to you, give it a go.” A Reader

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Feeding Frenzy sets a marker on Self’s career, not least because the unorthodox restaurant reviews he wrote for The Observer, from 1995-97, are collated here – reviews that afforded him a notoriety with which he colluded. While readers choked on their laughter, cooks across the country were after Self’s blood.

The selection in Feeding Frenzy is vast. Essays taken from art catalogues sit comfortably next to travel pieces and a notable interview with Salman Rushdie, a man, who, perhaps not unlike Self, has been ‘demonised by the media and popular perceptions’. But before reading any of Feeding Frenzy, it is advisable to consult the index, which covers not only the usual ‘people, places and things, but also ideas, obsessions and my own irritating stylistic tics’, so as to include ‘tongues, locking’, matching socks and shoes, co-ordinated foot- and sockwear’, and ‘snicker-snack, fateful, of psychosis’.

Self has always considered himself a writer, as opposed to either an author and/or a journalist. He writes to commission. And although there are certain things he would rather not touch, such as reviewing the screenplay of Natural Born Killers, throughout this collection he displays a severe knack for turning the merest detail into the most essential one. Just turn to the index and look up Barratt Homes and read how Self indulged one Friday morning in ‘reverse commuting’ to discover that there existed at least one word that, until then, he didn’t know: ‘flaunching’.

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