"He was never afraid to stand up against others in his profession – if someone botched up, he would say so. "My father was, I believe from his students, the most brilliant teacher," she says. Like him, she has a first-class brain, becoming England's youngest barrister when she passed her bar exams at the age of 21. Like him, she became an alcoholic (though unlike him, she has managed to overcome it). It's not only a physical resemblance – though that is striking – it's that she has inherited so many of his traits: his failings, as well as his strengths. And yes, she admits a few minutes later, she is extraordinarily like him. It's almost as though she's caricaturing Arthur, whom she's described as terrifying her into scuttling away during mealtimes to look up facts in the encyclopaedia, forgoing her food rather than incurring his wrath. "Now, do you want this interview to go ahead or not?" "You can't use that in here or they'll kick you out," she says, in a voice that sounds genuinely angry, and definitely scary. Large, scrubbed, bulldog-like, her first words when we meet are to berate me for using my phone in the lounge of the Goring hotel (I am talking to the picture editor) in Belgravia, central London. What you see is what you get with Clarissa: she's exactly the same in the flesh as the cook and countryside campaigner you've watched on television.
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