Nicholas Shakespeare is assigned the task of reviewing Tom Bowers’ take on Lord and Lady Black and has this anecdote to start:
I never met this newspaper's previous proprietor, although I worked as his literary editor on the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. He once tried to stop me employing a reviewer who had criticised the foreign policy of Henry Kissinger (then a Hollinger director). Grateful to have a chairman who read these pages, I invited Black to review books in areas where he clearly had an interest (The Oxford Book of Canadian Military Anecdotes). Connoisseurs of his prose have likened it to a medieval siege engine and the act of reading it to “wading through wet cement” (Max Hastings), but he had an intelligence and a style, and it got him off my back.
Before eventually pronouncing Bower’s book to be a bit of a bore:
This book is a bit like candy, too. One consumes it greedily, but feels a little sick afterwards. To rise so high, there has to be more of a story. Black might be a shit, but he's an interesting shit who is, I suspect, sadder and more complex than Bower allows. If there's a fault to his biography, which has taken under a year to write, it is Bower's decision to treat Black merely as a white-collar criminal.