Lord Weidenfeld

You are renowned for your love of parties, for your giving of parties rather than going to them. Do you find true enjoyment giving parties?

Well, I do enjoy seeing many friends from different countries and also from different s uh milieus, uh meeting and either getting on or finding that some of the prejudices were misplaced. I do like this um idea of uh bridge building. Now that's all very sounds pompous and also banal, but there is certainly an element of that.

Is it important to you that people like you?

I think it's one of my vices to want to be liked. And I think it is a great handicap in life.

You have been married three times and divorced three times. Do you blame in any way the ending of those relationships on your enormous appetite for work?

Uh I probably married uh my first wife uh was very young. Uh she was a young nineteen and I was a very old thirty two. And therefore perhaps um there was this difference. and I didn't have enough time to devote myself to cultivating the marriage to nursing it. And um I regretted the breakup of my first marriage very much because I had this because uh the notion, the idea of a sort of really conventional uh family life, sort of patriarchal life, um, was a romantic notion that I always had. My second wife, who was recently written and uh much discussed, Um and very widely reviewed book. was um a very different thing altogether. Uh that was um the um It's the the story of um passion, uh you might say obsession, which had an unhappy end. Um and um The m third marriage. might have worked. Very well. But there were logistical problems. She was American. She had a family in America that she thought needed her, and children needed her, and found certain found problems of adapting herself to English life and so on. And but we've remained very good friends indeed.