TORONTO — You're not really a "somebody" until you've made the titular list of Barbara Amiel's new autobiography "Friends and Enemies.".
She makes a lengthy defence of her husband, the former Telegraph owner and Tory peer Conrad Black, who was imprisoned for obstruction of justice and fraud. Most reviewers have called the book funny.
Here I come, Chanel, I thought.” (Alas, for her and Chanel, the FBI seized the money soon after.) As it turns out, not much, according to Amiel. Eh?
“It would take years for the allegations against Conrad to be revealed as false,” she continues, assuming that famous kama sutra position, the reverse ferret. Nor did he make the cabinet, due to what Swire thinks is positive discrimination: there were already too many old Etonians in the cabinet. Former Sun editor Barbara Amiel lambastes Ghislaine Maxwell in memoir Back to video “Ghislaine was renovating a house on 65th St. in Manhattan — we were on 66th, so it was easy to bump into her. She prides herself on her political nous, telling her husband how to strategise, and he duly sags, like a coat — but she doesn’t care about the country her set is governing. Black has always maintained his innocence. And I suppose to be shocked, because I just found it funny. Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel at their Palm Beach mansion, Florida, 2004. But she rejects the notion that Black's glowing biography of the president might have influenced the decision.
But far from being shunned from the mainstream discourse, the release of Amiel's book this month was met with a media frenzy. In a moral universe, Amiel, Black and these relics from the 90s would have long since disappeared.
When I was 20, the newspaper magnate Conrad Black offered me a job.
It's my flamboyance.
The out-of-power couple: Barbara Amiel with Conrad Black (Photo by Boris Spremo/Toronto Star via Getty Images) Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.
But despite the nearly 600-page tome's vindictive title, Amiel insists the impulse to write "Friends and Enemies" was less about settling scores than an exercise in self-understanding. "You can only divide people really into enemies.".
A longtime Maclean's writer and the first female editor to helm the Toronto Sun, Amiel railed against the creep of the feminist progress she seemed to stand for. It’s been a while since I last thought about Amiel, and she had calcified in my mind into a mere checklist: rightwing columnist, fond of couture, once had a quarrel with my mother in a London store over a pashmina (my mother won). Did real people live like that? Amiel is a different thing: an outsider. (Trump receives a special mention among the "supportive high office holders" on Amiel's list.). She frames her memoir as a work of literary revenge on the friends who stopped talking to her at the opera. For instance, her … "If you've been through a life of some ups and downs, but haven't accomplished anything substantial, and yet, at the same time have evoked such incredible spite in some people, you realize that your view of yourself must be flawed. We were at an event for young journalists, though I was the opposite of his usual social milieu, being shy, scruffy and riddled with self-doubt – the opposite of his wife, columnist Barbara Amiel. Swire is professionally thwarted and angrier than she pretends: she obviously wanted to be a cabinet minister but instead is a superb diarist who has written a betrayal, as superb diarists do. But to those of us who increasingly fear another Trump term, it reads more like a reminder of its tenacity.
"Those are the kinds of things that one fights until the grave faces you. I don't think I'll ever be able to stop that fight. What they mean is that Amiel, unlike Swire, cannot edit herself: that is the drugs.
The most salacious tidbits — bedroom intrigue, high-society badmouthing, her bloodthirsty proclamation that she wants to see her persecutors "guillotined" — have already been mined for tabloid fodder and journalistic lampoonery.
Codeine is a painkiller; an anaesthetic. Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel at their Palm Beach mansion, Florida, 2004. hen I was 20, the newspaper magnate Conrad Black offered me a job.
She was formerly a journalist, as Amiel was: surely there is more?).
Soon to turn 80, Amiel rehashes her greatest hits of grudge-holding with vicious verve in her recently released memoir tracking her high-wire trajectory from polarizing political journalist, to couture-clad socialite, and finally, self-styled exile of the establishment she and her husband once commanded.
But she said her sense of humour was lost on what she characterizes as the cabal of rivals and lawyers dead-set on dethroning Black from his media company, Hollinger Inc., where he was chief executive and chairman. When she sells her flat, ostensibly to pay Black’s legal bills, she “sighed with relief.
Maxwell drowned, but his daughter, Ghislaine, continued until recently to live the high life in New York; now charged in connection with former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, she may yet get the justice her father evaded.
She burst into the headlines as a right-wing rebuttal to Gloria Steinem: a raven-haired bombshell, brash as she was bawdy, with an acerbic wit and aptitude for rattling established orthodoxies.
Then there’s Trump himself, always the most ludicrous member of the gilded gang – and look where he is now. The second is by far the odder book but Amiel has been a drug addict for years.
She found the hags terrifying: “Those dreadful lesbian suits,” asks one of Saint Laurent couture, “why do you buy them?” When Conrad fell they fled of course, because they were only ever friends with the money; as Swire was only friends with the power.
The convictions related to what prosecutors called Black's scheme to siphon off millions of dollars from the sale of newspapers owned by Hollinger. Swire’s primary resentment is that her father did not get a peerage. Amiel’s book is too inadvertently self-parodic to be a revenge memoir. He smiled, less like a boss offering employment, more like a king bestowing a blessing.
"'Friends' is something that fluctuates throughout your life," Amiel said in a recent phone interview. That woke you up, didn’t it?
If you are interested in political gossip — and this book confirms things but does not expose them — it is gripping because betrayal is always gripping. Backlog Break - The high-flying frustration of A Story About My Uncle, Backlog Break - The baffling world of Legend of Mana. When she told Vogue magazine in 2002 that her "extravagance knows no bounds," surrounded by closets full of high-priced fashions, Amiel said she was making a self-deprecating joke. "I needed to know who I was," said Amiel.
It would have been a better — and more moral book — if she had been honest. In an interview, Amiel asserted that the current "cancel culture" would prohibit such a "civilized exchange of views" without the threat of professional retribution.
& If you think that any hint of criticism of anyone who happens to be a woman is tantamount to a... Tanya Gold calls Sasha Swire a ‘superb diarist’ and implicitly admires Amiel’s talents. Well! She learned that lesson the hard way as hangers-on scurried away from the fallout of the supernova-like explosion of her and Black's lavish lifestyle.
I think she inserted passages to make herself more sympathetic because they do not read like contemporaneous notes; and it is obviously a lie that she didn’t write this book for publication. You can, 2 dead, 15 wounded in Vienna terror attack, authorities say, Rocky Mountain Dealerships strikes go-private deal that values it at $135 million, Indigenous teen drafted by Stanley Cup champions, Willowbrook producer focused on rare Lacombe pigs, Mayor acclaimed in 2020 race, welcomes new term, Kamsack fire truck donated through Fire Fighters Without Borders. With their union came a new set of gilded obligations that Amiel said she felt ill-equipped to uphold — the duties of running a 26,000-square-foot estate, difficulty navigating the mannered milieu of the ladies-who-lunch but barely eat, the pressure to accumulate the requisite regalia to win the approval of the beau monde (a burden exacerbated by Amiel's own spendthrift shopping habits).
Rather, he was pardoned by Trump, and the fact that the year before Black had knocked out a book about the president with its nose so determinedly up his arse it might have doubled as a colonoscopy was, surely, just a coincidence. But in the end, Amiel said it wasn't her elite excesses that did her in, but the irresistible pull of a punchy turn of phrase. Of her affair with the then 68-year-old publisher George Weidenfeld, Amiel writes that embracing him was “like clutching death”, but that he conferred certain “social advantages”.
They did: for those who wonder if the 90s were just a weird fever dream involving relative international calm and conspicuous consumption, Amiel’s forthcoming memoir, Friends And Enemies, is the equivalent of a Chanel-clad zombie returning from the dead. Life was there to be mocked. Amiel has often been compared to Marie Antoinette, who she once dressed as for a party at Kensington Palace. Barbara Amiel didn’t always live the high life.
We were at an event for young journalists, though I was the opposite of his usual social milieu, being shy, scruffy and riddled with self-doubt – the opposite of his wife, columnist, exaggerated the number of Muslim people living in France.
But what does friendship really mean in the rarefied realm that Amiel occupied as the conservative columnist wife of a newspaper baron, Lady to Lord Conrad Black, who in joining forces became a British-Canadian media power couple?
Barbara Amiel is shown in a handout photo. From Becky Sharp to Eva Peron, upwardly mobile shaggers have made for fun books (and musicals), and Amiel, who worked her way up the social ladder via the medium of her sharp brain, sharper elbows, and four husbands, fits right in. Please click here to submit your pitch. Why did that feel so weird?
Instead, I’d put it in the category of upwardly mobile shagging memoir. You might feel a little pity too, for something worthless lost. ", "As long as I had Conrad at my side, I could handle the extraordinarily high ozone layer that he took me into, socially speaking," said Amiel. "Human rights and freedom of speech in Canada is in great peril. She doesn’t say: betrayal will only extend so far. You're not really a "somebody" unless you've made the titular list of "Friends and Enemies" in Amiel's new autobiography.
", "I think I'm as reliable as it's possible for a human being to be when confronted with what they consider to be the truth about themselves.". And hopefully, you have your lipstick on when the grave faces.". The out-of-power couple: Barbara Amiel with Conrad Black (Photo by Boris Spremo/Toronto Star via Getty Images). Swire, though, has too many: I think of them as fences in her mind.
Find out what's happening in your community and submit your own local events. She just suspects that Sasha is brighter than her husband. Born into a Jewish family in Hertfordshire, England, Amiel said her adolescent uprooting to Hamilton, Ont., instilled in her a feeling of displacement that stuck with her. "Once I realized (Black) had done absolutely nothing wrong, I then ... looked to myself, and I thought, I'm the cause of this.
It’s a book review and reviewers have to read between the lines to some extent or there would be no point in the task.