Conrad Black's days as a British newspaper proprietor may be over, but he is far from forgotten. He and his wife, Barbara Amiel, dominate today's papers. The Sunday Times runs the second lengthy instalment of its serialisation of Tom Bower's biography, Conrad and Lady Black. The first part clearly upset Black who is given a page in the paper he used to own, the Sunday Telegraph to retaliate. He lays into Bower - and the Daily Mail, for its "spoiler" - but it's the final paragraph that catches the eye:
"How did the Sunday Times, and its book-publishing affiliate, HarperCollins, Bower's publisher, and even the Daily Mail, sink to such depths? What depraved them to the point of publishing such sewage? To pose the question is to answer it; everyone with any interest in the British media knows who is responsible for the collapsed standards of these entities. They must answer for it eventually."
The Sunday Telegraph also devoted the cover of its magazine, Seven, to a picture montage of Amiel as Marie Antoinette to introduce her article about the French queen who, she concludes, nudge nudge, was the victim of "crude pamphleteers". And in the Independent on Sunday, one journalist who knew Amiel well, the former Daily Telegraph deputy editor, Sarah Sands, writes a delightfully entertaining recollection of their relationship that is anything but crude.
A sample: "I remember talking to her about trying to hire a new comment editor, and she said that she too had been having troubles with the butler." (Via Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Independent on Sunday)
