Barbara Amiel is vulgar, greedy, ruthless, cruel, and thrillingly unself-aware, but after devouring every line of her frighteningly, hilariously, gob-smackingly honest book, I’ve got to admit, I like her.

... throughout this book she remains very much Barbara the undermothered Jewish girl from Hendon, a wartime kitten who, with no little melodrama and self-pity, has survived by purring and biting and writing.

... extraordinary.

Ms. Amiel leaves no score unsettled in this waspish, often scandalous, gossipy, vengeful, intimate chronicle of her tumultuous life (there’s even a 'friends and enemies' list at the end). It’s also disarmingly frank, funny and very well written.

This is a verbose, distracted and irritating book. Parts are well worth reading: other sections are nearly unreadable. It would have been more appetizing if Amiel had given as much attention to the gallantry of her true friends – the playwright Ronnie Harwood, England’s leading contrarian Andrew Roberts, the historian Hugh Thomas, for example – as to the brittle, spiteful, emotionally stunted nonentities of the American kleptocracy..

... scorching.

... observant and unforgiving.