THE VANITY FAIR DIARIES

by Tina Brown

(W&N £9.99) IN 2015, Tina Brown began browsing the journals she had kept during the heady years from 1983-1992 when she was editing Vanity Fair magazine in New York.

Her intention was to write a book about the Crazy Eighties: ‘But the more I read, the more I realised I had already written one.’

Brown’s job placed her at the centre of the glamour and hedonism of Manhattan during the Reagan era, and she views this world with the beady eye of someone who is neither insider nor outsider, but both at the same time.

Her pen portraits of the denizens of the Manhattan zoo are invariably sharp, and sometimes caustic — yet Brown is at home in this world, and in love with it, and the relish with which she records it makes for compulsive reading.