Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir is a rather bracing read: amidst all the gossip and glamour of his life as a magazine supremo, he refers to being molested by a schoolteacher as a young boy, having to identify the body of a colleague who has just died and his father’s Alzheimer’s. This gives the book a rounded sense that it is not a superficial skim through parties and escapades (such as the time he followed the woman who would become his wife, whom he had met once, to India so he could “accidentally” bump into her) that one might expect from the former chairman of Condé Nast. The stories are staggering nonetheless: he gives a funny account of the £100m lawsuit Mohamed Al-Fayed, the then owner of Harrods, brought against Vanity Fair which Coleridge eventually settles with Al-Fayed’s PR man in a steam room (chosen as there was no chance of either of them wearing a wire there).
