Rachel Cook Meets Robert Fisk, Aka Mr Bob
The Guardian’s Rachel Cooke meets Robert Fisk:
We are talking - or, rather, he is talking. Luckily he has a loud, uncompromising kind of a voice and the balcony is tiny, so he is close to me, both of which ensure that I can hear him above the roar of cruising Mercedes below. It is the end of a long day - he picked me up at nine this morning for a drive south to the border with Israel, and I’ve been with him every minute since - but, if anything, Fisk’s energy, unlike my own, increases with every word he utters. On he goes: unrelenting, furious, pernickety and labyrinthine in argument. Every anecdote involves three dusty side alleys, every explanation three historical examples.
It is worrying that he refers to himself repeatedly in the third person. ‘Have you read any Fisk?’ he asks me on the telephone before I land in Beirut, a question that is insulting on so many levels. And now I’m here, he keeps calling himself ‘Mr Bob’. Oh, well.
Fisk is fisked…