Diana Evans who was catapulted overnight into the role of culture editor, going on to interview a roster of stars like Lauryn Hill, Viola Davis, Alice Walker and Edward Enninful.

We watch as she dances on stages in London and travels through Cuba. We walk by her side as she navigates the world- her family and the midlife sandwich, reflections on fashion, yoga, the British monarchy and lockdowns, and the lasting impact of George Floyd and Grenfell.

Evans’s “All the Notes”, where she demonstrates just how far she departed from that minimalist utopia to which she has aspired. As artists carry sketchbooks, writers have notebook. 

In I Want to Talk to You,  a collection of many example of her precise, perceptive, empathetic journalism, with her witty and seductive writing.

“ Hot-air balloons, drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky”, of the blazing young dancer Carlos Acosta, she writes “ the visceral flamboyance of Afro-Cuban culture tussels with the linearity and elitism of ballet” while  the “warm and wearily flamboyant” Edward Enninful is “ no stranger to the passing abuses of systematic racism”.

Alice Walker, “one of the fundamental visionaries of our time”, whose writing “ remains languid and effortlessly graceful, and has not lost its enormous power to prod at the sorest, most critical anxieties of human condition”.

She is very good indeed at yoga, and that she made seven dresses during lockdown and that she finds herself gently, and happily, loosening the constraints of her own work ethic to drive her elderly mother, once a week, to a seated exercise class, for which her mother emerges “sort of windswept and happy”.   

I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations by Diana Evans, Chatto & Windus £18.99, 256 pages.