According to journalistic legend, one day in 1994, Max Wilkinson, editor of the Financial Times’s weekend edition, was approached by a PR man to do a series of sponsored celebrity interviews that would artfully weave in a mention of a newly launched car. Wilkinson, naturally, squelched the idea. But, the legend goes, the germ of that thought led, laterally, to the idea of a series of themed interviews, which became Lunch With the FT—now one of the FT’s most-read columns, along with the famous backpage Lex column. This delightful book is a collection of 52 of the best of those interviews.