The wears and whens of Susannah’s star-studded life

Ready For Absolutely Nothing Susannah Constantine Michael Joseph €24 ★★★★★

Best known as the co-presenter of the early 2000s makeover show What Not To Wear, on which she and Trinny Woodall became famous for grabbing their subjects’ boobs, Susannah Constantine no longer bossily dictates to women the length of their hems or instructs quivering housewives to throw out their wardrobe.

Indeed, this entertaining and funny memoir reveals a self-deprecating personality, frequently pillorying her own sartorial choices. Her shoes are ‘the kind you’d find advertised in the back of a Sunday supplement next to bed jackets and incontinence pants’, she writes, and she cheerfully claims to have ‘made a career as the dumpy one standing next to the rangy, languid-limbed Trinny’.

She insists that during a stint as a model, ‘the only job I managed to land was the “before” foot model for Dr Scholl corn pads and it soon became clear I was no Christie Brinkley’.

Nevertheless, she has certainly led a supermodel sort of life. She flies to Lahore with Imran Khan, visits sex clubs in Berlin with the lead singer of the Scissor Sisters, and parties with an underwhelming Andy Warhol in New

York. Born into a wealthy family, she peoples these pages with more toffs than you can shake a sceptre at.

It’s essentially a Baedeker, Debrett’s and a Who’s Who rolled into one.

She was also famous for stepping out with Queen Elizabeth’s nephew Viscount Linley, son of Princess Margaret (above, with Constantine). At one point, Constantine finds herself invited for a stay at Balmoral at the same time as then prime minister Margaret Thatcher. During a day of salmon-fishing on the Dee, tea is brought out from the castle.

When Constantine holds out her cup to be filled, the Queen and Mrs Thatcher engage in a battle of wills over who is to ‘be mother’, tussling for possession of a large brown teapot.

Naturally, the Queen eventually wins. Honeysuckle Weeks