Tina Brown

"I had to admit I liked him hughly. He was in an American country gentlemans three-piece suit and heavy shoes, and was by turns urbane and shady. His face seems to have been made for the cartoonists distortion the gargoyle lips, deep furrows in the brow, the hint of five oclock shadow that gives him such an underworld air when hes sunk in thought."

"International diplomacy rarely offers encounters with angels. But Prince Andrews adhesive contacts with reprehensible foreign riff-raff went far beyond what was explicable or acceptable. He hosted lunches at Buckingham Palace for the insalubrious relatives of Middle Eastern tyrants, invited a Libyan gun smuggler to Princess Eugenies wedding and Princess Beatrices 21st birthday party, and went goose-hunting with Kazakhstans then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Kazak strongmans baby-faced billionaire son-in-law bought the Yorkss white-elephant pile, Sunninghill Park, for £3 million over its £12 million asking price. This was doubly puzzling because the only enhancements to the house since the Yorkss occupation was a new zoning designation that put it under the direct flight path of Heathrow Airport."

"The truth is that, although hell be trouble, hell also be enormous fun and H. has had so many years of Thomson greyness this vivid rascal could brine back some of the jokes. "I sacked the best editor of the News of the World," he said at one point. "He was too nasty even for me. [[w:Bernard Shrimsley|[Bernard] Shrimslev]] had to ask himself what the ordinary man wanted to read that week. Stafford Somerfield knew!"

"Large, blond, and ebullient in his well-tailored suits, my father filled a room with his commanding height and broken nose."

"The last hard patriotic triumph in most Brits recall was Margaret Thatchers 1982 invasion of an obscure dot in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands, to wrest it back from another country no one has time to read about, Argentina."

"Unlikely heroes and anti-heroes emerged. A viral favorite was John Bercow, the barrel-chested Speaker of the House of Commons, whose calls for "Order, Order Order" over the brawling MPs have sound-tracked the opposite of his exhortation."

"Princess Diana, the shy introvert unable to cope with public life, has emerged as the star of the worlds stage. Prince Charles, the public star unable to enjoy a satisfying private life, has made peace at last with his inner self. While he withdraws into his inner world, his wife withdraws into her outer world. Her panic attacks come when she is left alone and adulation-free on wet days at Balmoral; his come when his father tells him he must stop being such a wimp and behave like a future king. What they share is an increasing loss of reality. Ironically, both are alienated by the change in the other."

"If he passed her up he would find himself like a royal Roman Polanski dating thirteen-year-old girls when he was forty. The press, led by Nigel Dempster, had corralled poor Lady Diana and were howling for a happy ending. His family wanted it. The public wanted it. Like the last Prince of Wales, he liked to confide in married women, and his two favorites, Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker-Bowles, wanted it. They had met the blushing little Spencer girl and deduced she was not going to give them any trouble."

"When did Britain go out of its mind? As a transplant from London to New York, Im often asked that question."

"By many measures, though, Browns eighties world was less rule-governed than the present, and some rascals show their colors early on its schoolyard turf. In June of 1986, Brown goes to Oxford for a story on the death of a young heiress from a heroin overdose. She hires a student journalist, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, to make introductions. Mostyn-Owen fobs off Brown at a lunch with posh kids and her boyfriend, "a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson." A bit later, the Sunday Telegraph publishes, under Mostyn-Owen’s byline, a snarky account of Browns visit, centered on the lunch. Brown finds that shes extensively misquoted—unsurprisingly, since Mostyn-Owen wasnt there. "Boris Johnson is an epic shit," Brown concludes. "I hope he ends badly."

"The moment the contract was signed, he was utterly different from the person who had been romancing me for five months. It became clear that nothing that hed told me was true in terms of what the budget was going to be. And Id never walked into that weird crepuscular den of Miramax when he was courting me. Id always met him in a restaurant. As soon as I was sitting in that room with that horrible mangy sofa, which I now think of as the Plymouth Rock of the #MeToo movement — suddenly Im sitting there in this dark room with Harvey [Weinstein] yelling and screaming, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is insane."

"After making it through her Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne in June, she lived long enough to kiss off her 14th prime minister, Boris Johnson, and welcome her 15th to form Her Majestys government. From Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. One would love to know — and never will — what the privately astringent Queen Elizabeth thought about this particular arc of political history."