Anna: The Biography

by Amy Odell Allen & Unwin 464pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99

“Even if you don’t care about fashion, you know who Anna Wintour is,” said Sarah Ditum in The Times. The editor of American Vogue for over 30 years, with her trademark bob and glasses, she has established a “tastemaking tyranny” not just over the fashion world, but the “entire ecosystem of celebrity”. Although Anna: The Biography is not an authorised life, Amy Odell interviewed many of Wintour’s friends and colleagues; her subject declined to be interviewed, but let it be known that she was “not opposed to the book’s existence”. The result is “fascinating”, said Daisy Goodwin in The Sunday Times: the most rounded portrait of Wintour yet. While at work she’s strikingly similar to the “exacting Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada”

– a novel by her ex-assistant Lauren Weisberger. But at home she seems to be a “lovable matriarch”, who “changes her grandchildren’s nappies”.

Although this book doesn’t quite capture Wintour’s charisma, it contains plenty of “gems”, said Lisa Armstrong in The Daily Telegraph. Wintour is reportedly so “wrinkle-averse” that she once had a baby’s chin airbrushed before allowing it in her magazine. In the face of staff protests, she commissioned a fawning interview with Asma Al-Assad, wife of the Syrian dictator, and then, when a backlash ensued, froze out the journalist she’d persuaded to write it (previously a close friend). Odell tries to find the humanity in her subject, but fails, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman. Wintour comes across as cold, privileged (her father, “Chilly Charlie” Wintour, was editor of the Evening Standard) and a “hellish person to work for”, who “ritualistically” humiliates junior colleagues. She has insisted that she’ll never write her memoirs, telling friends: “I’m so bored by me”. “By the end of this book, so was I.”