Maureen Cleave

Maureen Diana Cleave (20 October 1934 – 6 November 2021) was a British journalist. She worked for the London Evening Standard from 1958 conducting interviews with many prominent musicians of the era, including Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Over 50 years, she continued to interview people in all walks of life, in the Standard, the Telegraph Magazine, Observer Magazine, SAGA magazine, Intelligent Life magazine, and elsewhere.

Quotes

• Many people work hard to get their names into the newspapers. For Tariq Ali it is enough to fill in an application form to join the Labour Party, enclosing a cheque for £5, and he makes the front page of The Times.
  • "The discreet charm of the bogeyman", Evening Standard (17 December 1981), p. 7
  • The heading misquotes The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), the surrealist film directed by Luis Buñuel.

• The lines on his forehead arrange themselves in an odd chequered pattern, like a puzzle waiting to be filled in — or are, perhaps, a reflection of his past.
  • From an interview of Lord (Jeffrey) Archer, as cited in "Remarkable, truly remarkable", The Sunday Telegraph (9 August 1992; from the "Review" section, p. XIII)

• With a PR man at his side, the quote would never have got into my notebook, let alone the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, where it ended up. As it was, the Evening Standard didn't even put it in the headline. We were used to him sounding off like that and knew it was ironically meant. But the Americans have little sense of irony, and when the article appeared in a magazine called Dateline, all hell broke loose. It was the last time the Beatles ever toured.
  • "The John Lennon I knew", The Telegraph (5 October 2005)
  • Referring to a comment by John Lennon ("We're more popular than Jesus now") which was originally cited in Cleave's interview published on 4 March 1966. The article was actually reprinted in Datebook a few months later.