Tatler UK

tatler contributors

BARBARA AMIEL This month, the arch provocatrice and former Sunday Times columnist Barbara Amiel releases her memoir, Friends and Enemies, chronicling her four marriages, entry into British society and years standing by her husband, the notorious media mogul Conrad Black. Read an extract in this issue, alongside an eye-opening interview. What compelled Amiel to write the book? ‘Masochism,’ she says. ‘I lost an inch and a half in height, huddled over the computer for three years. My taller sister likes me now.’ CHRISTINA OXENBERG Society writer Christina Oxenberg is the daughter of a Serbian princess – and cousin to the British Royal Family, with a contacts book full of high-profile names. For this month’s cover story, she writes about the future that lies ahead for her second cousin’s son and his American wife…

out with a bang

WITH THE BIG GUNS holed up in the countryside, and London’s social scene still waking up from hibernation, it has never been more important to bag an invitation to the right shooting parties. But for anyone new to the scene, it can be a minefield of unfamiliar social nuances, old-money rules and big-business deals. Many a high-society love affair, though, has started out on the grouse moor. An excellent shot can be catnip to women standing on their peg. And to men, a girl who can shoot is an irresistible combination of mildly terrifying and phenomenally attractive. This season, of course, things will be a little different – the old late-night corridor creep is a no-no in the time of coronavirus, replaced by fireside flirting and the frisson of look-but-don’t-touch. But…

heir bands

WHAT DO THE EARL OF Durham and the Duke of Beaufort have in common? Yes, both are tall. Yes, both own idyllic country estates. And yes, both are married to beautiful younger women. What else? They are both in bands. Up and down the country, behind Grinling Gibbons oak doors and beneath the watchful eyes of ancestral portraits, the love affair between the aristocracy and a good melody is reaching a crescendo. Tudor monarchs were famed for their musical skills (Henry VIII on the lute and harp, and Elizabeth I on the virginals), as was Prince Albert, who serenaded Queen Victoria with his own composition when she proposed. More racily, the Rothschild scion Pannonica de Koenigswarter (the ‘Bebop Baroness’) devoted her life to jazz, abandoning her husband and five children in 1951…

dinner-party politics

THERE’S ONLY ONE THING worse than sitting next to a dull person at a dinner party and that’s sitting next to a politician. Some will treat you like a fellow Question Time panellist and simply talk over you the entire time. Others will leap on your feigned fascination with housing policy and deluge you in white papers. But a politician’s partner – well, there’s a reason why Michelle Obama is the hottest ticket in the world. And why Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia – then regent – and his wife, Princess Olga, and the Duke of Kent and his wife, Princess Marina, gathered one night to sit around Lady Honor Guinness’s 25ft dining table as guests of her super-snobbish Tory MP husband, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. And why…

black mischief

BARBARA AMIEL HAS, SHE says, ‘hung myself with my own words so many times’. There’s resignation in her voice, but the 79-year-old author shows no signs of kicking the habit now. ‘Tediously opinionated,’ she writes in her new memoir, Friends and Enemies, describing the American socialite Mercedes Bass. ‘I couldn’t believe that she actually digested food and excreted it like the rest of us, being so constipated in her manners and determined never to return to her former heavier self.’ Of the philanthropic Dame Vivien Duffield, she notes that she ‘had a streak of cruelty that masqueraded as honesty’ after Duffield dissed her dining room. As for her erstwhile chum Henry Kissinger, she tells me that the hard-nosed master of Realpolitik ‘is easily intimidated and knows a lot of fear. He…

looking black: conrad’s life and times

1944 Black is born in Montréal to ‘a very large family of athletic, handsome people’ – also rich 1959 Expelled from Upper Canada College for selling stolen exam papers 1966 Buys his first newspaper, The Eastern Townships Advertiser, in Québec 1976 His father, George Black, takes his own life; Black and his brother, Monte, inherit George’s media and industrial empire 1978 Marries former secretary Joanna Hishon; they have three children, Jonathan, Alana and James. In 1984, Black is a guest at Barbara Amiel’s third wedding 1986 Wins battle with Berry family to control Telegraph group – ‘the coup of the century’, says mogul Tony O’Reilly 1992 Divorce from Joanna finalised, Black marries Barbara Amiel. Couple buy Cottesmore Gardens mansion; give endless dinners and galas Mid-1990s Black is rumoured to have bought Napoleon’s penis to add to his Napoleonica collection 1996 Acquires the Southam newspaper chain, gaining control…