Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge
Tom Bower has built a reputation as the biographer the powerful would rather avoid, having turned his forensic eye on figures from Robert Maxwell to Richard Branson. Here, he trains that same unsettling gaze on media magnate Conrad Black and his extravagant wife, Barbara Amiel, and the result is a compulsive portrait of ambition curdling into catastrophe. Short version: it's quite the story. Longer version: buckle up. Born into Canadian wealth, Black acquired and offloaded a string of businesses, from mining operations to newspaper groups, rarely pausing to manage any of them with much rigour. His 1985 purchase of the Telegraph titles brought him to London, where his chequered financial history was largely unknown. Marriage to Barbara Amiel in 1992 proved the accelerant. Her own declaration that her extravagance 'knows no bounds' turned out to be less a confession than a blueprint. Private jets, couture, palatial homes and lavish parties followed, all funded by a fortune that couldn't quite stretch to cover the mythology surrounding it. By 2003, an independent American report was using phrases like 'corporate kleptocracy' and 'outright fraud'. The Chicago trial of 2007 brought everything into sharp, unforgiving focus, and this updated paperback edition covers that courtroom drama in full. Bower draws on more than 150 conversations with bankers, politicians, celebrities and insiders, giving the book an intimacy that pure journalism rarely achieves. It reads as a thoroughly entertaining study of vanity and credulity at the highest social altitudes.
- Author: Tom Bower
- Publisher: Harper Perennial
- Genre: Journalism & Media Studies
- ISBN: 978-0007247165
- Pages: 448 pages