Barbara Amiel

Friday

Barbara Amiel

The Barbara Amiel Edition

From our UK edition

59 min listen

Barbara Amiel, Baroness Black, is a journalist, writer and socialite. She's been married four times - her fourth to the newspaper proprietor Conrad Black. On the podcast, she talks to Katy about her difficult childhood (which she describes as 'slightly unorthodox'), establishing her journalistic career in Toronto and London, comparing bathrooms with Ghislaine Maxwell, her glamorous marriage to Black and their fall from grace when he was jailed for fraud. Her new book, Friends and Enemies: A Memoir, is and out now.

Thursday

Barbara Amiel

Barbara Amiel: My memoir has cost me my best friends

From our UK edition

The only female writers of importance I have personally met are Margaret Atwood and Joan Didion, both of whom are rather short. That, I realise, is an advantage of sorts. You have less height to lose. Didion is 5ft 1in according to her Wiki entry, and Atwood, a tiny powerhouse, is listed optimistically as 5ft 4in, but that I think is like the Hollywood actors who I know are several inches shorter than listed heights, having stood breathlessly when Robert Redford walked passed me outside Bloomingdale’s in New York City. I mention this because after completing my third book, the first two written over 40 years ago when I was almost 5ft 8in, I am now 5ft 6in. I have lost an inch and a half since going into a three-year lockdown hunched at my desk.

Friday

Barbara Amiel

Diary – 19 August 2005

From our UK edition

I’ve taken to calling myself Lady Black of No Fixed Address while I spend the summer betwixt and between houses. Floating happily in a semi-weightless state, I stay in touch wherever I am by watching BBC World News. The BBC addiction to anti-Americanism is getting more acute and can only end in delirium tremens. Every second story has a negative take on America. Last week the ratio seemed higher. Every 20 minutes an anonymous voice promoted the upcoming news stories to the accompaniment of agitated music. Cue announcer: ‘Sixty years after the US dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, how do you feel about that attack?

Saturday

Barbara Amiel

Diary – 28 September 2002

In the electronic age, a social disease is a virus you get from your email correspondents. And often from one-night stands. Three such co-respondents sent me word that as an entry in their 'address book' my computer now had some awful disease. Complicated instructions to erase followed. When questioned, not one of the owners of these infected emails could describe the address or special characteristics of their virus. 'It's the worst and I don't understand it,' whined one. I don't have a card to give out and so I've luxuriated in the belief that my name and details remain my own.