'[Amiel] has raised the bar stratospherically for the celebrity memoir' The Times

'Whatever you do, read this brilliant book' Evening Standard

Barbara Amiel's long-awaited memoir is shockingly honest, richly detailed and pulls few punches. An instinctive feminist and now a foe of feminism's political correctness, her story covers a formidable array of experiences - political, sexual, marital and material. Her rise to the senior rungs of journalism began in Canada after the emigration of her family and continued in the United Kingdom on her return. With four marriages and an assorted number of beaus, some famous, some infamous (some rather young, some rather elderly), she moved through different worlds encountering problems made more intractable on occasion by her own faulty choices.

Her life has an operatic quality with a wildly diverse cast including Elton John, Henry Kissinger, Anna Wintour, Oscar de la Renta, Princess Diana and Tom Stoppard. The epic battle with the U.S justice system leading to the trial and imprisonment of her husband Conrad Black (eventually substantially vindicated) became a litmus paper for sorting out friends from those who were quick to judge and brutal in their dismissal. Friends and Enemies is not a book of vengeance but an attempt to find her own truth: a life that reads like a novel, eloquent, surprising, written with deeply personal candour and utterly un-put-downable.

'A scorching memoir exposing the cut-throat world of the one per cent' Daily Telegraph


'This raging, splendid, defiant, crazy tigress of a book said it all' Sunday Telegraph