FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

A MEMOIR

BARBARA AMIEL

Constable, 608pp, £25

The journalist Barbara Amiel, later Lady Black, was a Jewish girl from Watford. Her parents divorced when she was eight. Her unsatisfactory mother remarried, then took her to Canada. She never saw her father, a bent solicitor, again. He killed himself when she was 16. She learnt to fend for herself from an early age and worked her way up to become the editor of the Toronto Sun.

She was already on her third husband when she returned to England in 1986 to work for the

Times, Sunday Times and later the Daily Telegraph where she met its proprietor Conrad Black. They married in 1992. Their headily extravagant rise and subsequent disgrace are the principal subject of Friends and Enemies: A Memoir.

Sarah Sands in the Spectator commented, ‘It is described as a memoir, but is more of an operatic reckoning… She is beautiful but self-destructive, and literally cuts off her nose to spite her face.’ Still, she thinks the book and its author have many winning qualities. It is ‘a

Succession- style tale of media power, hubris and one of the great corporate court cases, followed by incarceration for Conrad Black’. Sands admired Amiel’s ‘resilience and, until hell freezes over, loyalty to Black’ and the way ‘she rains down curses on their enemies’. Her triumph is as ‘a kind of Medusa figure whose stare is best avoided’.

Camilla Long in the Sunday Times agreed that ‘not a single score remains unsettled’ in this ‘divinely bonkers book — a crazed page-turner as written from the inside by Marie Antoinette’. Quentin Letts in the

Times wrote that there was ‘something magnetic and magnificent about this sustained, occasionally deranged lament’.