As his trial approaches, Conrad Black is wringing his hands. While his lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, is the finest legal mind in Canada, Black is concerned that Greenspan lacks the requisite knowledge of the American justice system.

Black, Barbara and his daughter Alana (who Black weirdly describes as “beguiling”) trek to Chicago for the trial. Their ties to hotelier Izzy Sharp land them a suite in the Ritz-Carlton (yes, Sharp owns the Four Seasons, but he hooks Black up with his peeps at the Ritz nonetheless—anything for the dear Baron). But they’re still poor—the hotel room has “no special grandeur,” only a galley kitchen and rooms in which Conrad and Barbara can each do their work. Because there’s plenty to do: Conrad finishes his Nixon biography, and Barbara purchases a Hungarian puli that she names George Black, after Conrad’s father. Aw.

The action gets into sitcom territory when Black attends jury selection, where he’s flabbergasted by the pedestrian intellect of his potential peers, including a “gigantic, moustachioed woman” who claims to believe that everyone accused is guilty. Black is aghast: if he weren’t so preoccupied with his trial, he would totally go Henry Higgins and transform the riff raff into the bon ton.

The trial commences and is predictably boring—we admit that our eyes glazed over. Black watches as the prosecutor, Eric Sussman, manages to foil every motion Greenspan tries to make (seeing as the latter is so green when it comes to American law and all).

Despite Greenspan, however, everything is coming up Conrad. Those involved with the community newspaper sales admit that they only dealt with David Radler and that Black wasn’t involved, and the non-competition payments are repeatedly classified by the witnesses as “conditions of closing,” which suggests that they were all above board. Even Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente tells Black that she doesn’t think he’s going to go to prison (even though she hoped that he would).

In the words of the Lord:

• On the potential jurors: “I was unprepared for such a procession of mainly monosyllabic and listless people.”

• On the hobbies and interests of the potential jurors: “Most were low-brow magazines, soap operas, bowling, bingo, gardening, and attending to dogs. There did not appear to be as many as half of them who had ever read a book, played a game of chess, or watched a serious newscast.”

• On his true-blue fan club “Friends gave me several parting dinners and an avalanche of messages arrived, many accompanied by prayers and uplifting poems. There was a Conrad Black Fan Club website and a sequence of supportive T-shirts: ‘Conrad Will Win,’ ‘Go Conrad,’ ‘Free Conrad,’ and so forth.”

After what seems like a million pages (it’s actually 310), Conrad Black has finally been indicted. Boosted by testimony from David Radler (whom Black calls “the nasty gnome from Chicago”), the U.S. government is seeking a 95-year prison sentence. Plot-wise, we expected things to pick up around now—but instead Black just returns to his favourite topics: being poor, being persecuted by the media, and being friends with Elton John.

Believe it or not, Conrad is even more impoverished in this chapter than he was in the last. Liens are being taken out on all his homes (weren’t those sold already?), and the ever-noble Barbara goes behind Conrad’s back to sell her jewellery to “various oily gem dealers.” Black seems to be going slightly mad: at one point he even sets up a cardboard shelter in his garden room for lost ladybugs.

Seriously, Black’s basically a member of the 99 per cent now. Yet he’s still grateful the Man hasn’t taken everything away from him: at least he still has that sprawling, ostentatious Bridle Path mansion.

Also, did you know he’s friends with famous people? This time, he gives up trying to be casual about it, rattling off an actual list of celebrity friends. No surprise, it’s a collection of daffy eccentrics, including Dame Edna, Anna Wintour, Rush Limbaugh, Joan Collins, Ann Coulter and, of course, Sir Elton and David Furnish. (We’d totally go to that dinner party.)

Meanwhile, Black’s civil trial continues with a couple of small victories: the tax evasion charges and non-competition payment allegations are thrown out. Of course, prosecutor Eric Sussman then sticks him with the new charge of laundering money from Hollinger Inc. to finance Hollinger International. Zzzzzzzzz.

Oh, and somehow amid all the trials and hobnobbing and entomology, Black finds the time to write a 400,000-word biography of Richard Nixon.

In the words of the Lord:

• On his suffering: “On Christmas day, I read the book of Job. I discovered that while Job had endured more severe oppression than I had, he had been much less patient.”

• On Richard Nixon: “I’m not a bit like Richard Nixon, though in most respects he was an admirable person with whom comparisons would be flattering.”

•  On being the most overachieving client Eddie Greenspan ever had: “I wrote a 72-page dissection of the contradictory remarks and testimony of Breeden, Thompson, Kravis, Burt, Heath and Kissinger, as well as an outline of a response to all the counts.”

• On the depths of evil: “The posturing of seedy journalists, suddenly made over as Victorian dowagers, bandying about censorious descriptions of totally innocent people, was especially odious. Being removed from Christmas card lists was particularly irritating.”

The action picks up with Conrad and Barbara enjoying the pleasant August heat on their Bridle Path terrace and engaging in some amateur nature observations (deer, foxes, raccoons, skunks) with a tipple of white wine. Meanwhile, Barbara gets her job back at Maclean’s and the pair hang with Elton John (again). Sounds like paradise.

Of course, the Baron is also broke and facing civil charges, and everyone in the world is out to get him (that last thing may or may not be a figment of his imagination). David Radler, Black’s former business partner, has entered into a plea bargain with the U.S. prosecutors: in exchange for his testimony, he’ll get off easy. And we do mean easy—he’s sentenced to six months at a cushy penal colony with horseback riding, theatre arts and golf. Golf!

Naturally, this grates Black’s cheese. He launches into the first of many long tirades against the American justice system (he thinks it’s corrupt). Also corrupt: lawyers, the whole lot of them (except his own). But that’s not all. Black believes his house is bugged—apparently he heard the spies after the wrong switch was activated on the other end (um, because that happens all the time).

Black, as he does in every chapter, spends a great deal of time cataloging the various books and articles published about him. Bonus: this time, there’s also mention of Shades of Black, a CBC TV movie starring Albert Schultz as Black, Lara Flynn Boyle as Barbara and Jason Priestley as a wise-guy investigator. And, once again, Black devotes many, many words to sputtering like Yosemite Sam over his hatred for Richard Breeden. But this time he also reserves some rage for Peter C. Newman, who wrote a book that apparently makes some saucy allegations about Barbara’s supposed powers of persuasion. Never one to pass up a dramatic overture, Black summons his lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, to serve Newman a libel suit at a fancy dinner for Maclean’s 100th anniversary dinner. And because the universe requires balance, that triumph keeps Black on high for exactly three days before he’s indicted on criminal charges.

In the words of the Lord:

• On the practical purposes of writing his first memoir: “I tried to reduce the number of books and articles written about me by writing a book about myself in 1992, which was quite well-reviewed and sold well.”

• On his relationship with David Radler: “I knew he often mocked my vocabulary, speeches or writing as vanity or affectation, but I took this in stride.”

• On Peter C. Newman’s Here Be Dragons: “The section about Barbara was the lowest, nastiest, most revolting piece of journalistic sewage I have read. Newman purported to be the all-seeing connoisseur of our bedroom and from his lurid imagination explained to readers and then to interviewers that Barbara hooked me with her sexual wiles, which he purported to detail, with a ghoulishly prurient imagination.”

• On lead prosecutor Eric Sussman: “When he spoke, his wrists and hands moved jerkily, as if they were being manipulated by an amateur ventriloquist. When he stopped speaking, he went to a default countenance that was gape-mouthed, punctuated by his tongue bulging against the inside of his cheek like a lingual erection.”

Only in the distorted world of Conrad Black does moving become an ordeal on par with the Hundred Years War or the Rwandan genocide. He admires Barbara Amiel’s “sad and heroic efforts” as they pack up their 800 boxes to ship them to Toronto. Who knew renting a U-Haul truck could be so poetic?

Naturally, things get even weirder when the pair arrives home: Barbara seeks comfort with a life-size cardboard cutout of Black that she used to use when he couldn’t attend dinner parties, and Elton John gives her a jewellery box adorned with a pavé diamond, telling her she’s a star.

Meanwhile, Black is evicted from his offices at 10 Toronto St. When he arrives to clear out his humble belongings, he finds all his precious correspondence has been confiscated, including all his notes from every prime minister since, like, Laurier or something (except Kim Campbell, since she doesn’t really count). While naively transporting the remaining boxes to his car, he is surreptitiously videotaped and then slapped with the threat of contempt for obstructing evidence. Oh, such wacky hijinks.

But not all is lost: Black accepts an offer from the National Post to write a column on foreign affairs and begins to contemplate his next book, a biography of Richard Nixon. Also, at about the same time, a media type finally gives his case what Black considers to be a proper journalistic treatment—that is, he takes his side—and that media type is Ezra Levant.

So, with the looming possibility of a criminal case—not to mention that Conrad bruised his knee on a bike ride, a true family tragedy—the Blacks decide to make the most of the money they don’t have and visit England and the south of France. Apparently, late July and August is the height of “the season,” a phrase we thought died with Jane Austen. Back in Europe, they gallivant with Elton John (again) and his Scarborough-born hubby David Furnish, Lord Peter Carrington and Jacob Rothschild, who deign to be seen in public with the Baron.

In the words of the Lord:

• On his return home: “It was a retreat to Toronto, to a house I loved in a city and a country that hadn’t been especially congenial as I staggered along the gauntlet of the legal enforcers and jackal press of both countries (and overseas).”

• On his anticipation of a criminal case: “I would be upholding vital principles, I told myself—honest capitalism and impartial law, both of which had been degraded beyond recognition in this ghastly sequence of outrages.”

• On an excuse to use the word cockahoop: ““Let the press, as it did, go cockahoop celebrating my financial demise.”

• On (absurdly) comparing Barbara’s sadness to that of the Jews in World War II: “She reminded me of a well-known photo I showed her of European Jews during the Second World War being marched along the streets carrying their small bundles of belongings. Behind one such family walked a little girl, her body language summing up utter despair.”

• On David Radler’s attitude, described in a curious way: “He was a pessimist, and more than in the generic Jewish way.”

While reading this useless chapter, we started to wonder whether Conrad Black was being paid by the word. Or maybe he’s being paid by the letter since he’s such a supercilious blowhard—and nothing happens.

First, Black tries to get Hollinger back through an appeal to the OSC. (He also suffers through meetings with Catalyst chief Newton Glassman and his brigade of “podgy” women. Stay classy, Conrad.) When his appeal fails—and he once again defaults to being the real-life equivalent of the Brain from Pinky and the Brain—he realizes that he is “completely finished as an important businessman.” We realized that about five chapters and nine years ago.

The rest of the chapter is more of the same: name-dropping and shaming the media. He recalls the regal honour of attending Donald and Melania Trump’s 2005 wedding (once again: classy), where Donald, Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani all sing “Go Go Go Conrad” and urge him to stand his ground.

Later, the media clue into the fact that the Canada Revenue Agency has a lien on his Palm Beach house (Black insists that he arranged it voluntarily) and start teasing him for being poor. Our favourite: when the Guardian tells Barbara Amiel that she can save money on pantyhose by using a Sharpie to draw vertical lines up the backs of her legs. Come on, that’s funny. Eventually, it’s the London house that ends up going—and good riddance since, according to Barbara, it’s way too big for their humble livelihood.

In the words of the Lord:

• On re-enacting Bleak House at Christmas: “Barbara and I even managed modest gifts, accepted almost furtively by her, lest the boot in her sky notice we were having a good moment—something we had judged inappropriate in the hair-shirted, Dickensian bleakness of December 2003.”

• On Barbara’s spiritual side: “Though Barbara fights it, she is privately a person of faith who in bleak hours falls back on cantorial music and ritual, usually alone in a room out of sight.”

• On Barbara’s lyrical repertoire: “Barbara began humming “Little Things Mean a Lot,” which was part of her vast repertoire of Hit Parade songs from the 1950s.”

• On Richard Breeden not being up on his political manifestos: “It shortly became obvious that Breeden had made a classic mistake, one that Machiavelli in particular, had warned against: excessive reliance on mercenaries.”

As chapter seven opens, Conrad Black recalls the release of Richard Breeden’s lengthy investigative report called, somewhat hilariously, “A Corporate Kleptocracy.” Surprisingly, the long-awaited publication is a relief to Black—all of the alleged “skullduggery” turned out to just be rehashed accusations. Not much new information came out of the report, which, incidentally, is how we’re starting to feel about the Baron’s memoir (although it is expanding our vocabulary).

Not surprisingly, Black endures a fresh round of attacks from the media savages, who write new books and new articles that compare him to Cardinal Richelieu, Dr. Faustus and Fagan, while Babs is ridiculed for her pricey jogging clothes. Did Black mention how innocent his beloved Barbara is in all this? Well, he does it again a whole bunch of times in this chapter.

After Breeden’s report is released, Black is charged with a slew of SEC civil infractions. No sweat. It’s not like he’s going to get indicted on criminal charges. That’ll never happen.

Meanwhile, after this latest barrage of media attention, Black realizes he’ll never be able to return to Hollinger. Um, duh. He’s kicked out by the “witches’ coven” (the board), and to add insult to injury, informed of this fact on an otherwise pleasant walk through Central Park, right near the bench named for him and Barbara by Mayor Bloomberg (just in case we forgot that he knows important people).

Eventually, after a long, drawn-out deliberation, Hollinger Inc. is privatized and Black has only his new civil charges with which to contend. The chapter concludes with Black at his Toronto home—we’re not kidding—watching deer eat apples in his orchard as he hopes for a peaceful future.

In the words of the Lord:

• On the possibility of criminal charges: “Only when my dear Barbara, always prone to attacks of generic rabbinical pessimism, sadly whispered, ‘They’re going to take you away from me’ did I really fear a criminal trial.”

• On the savagery of his enemies: “All my opponents needed to do was bandy my name about, like Chamberlain flourishing his signed agreement with Hitler after Munich in 1938, to achieve their ends.”

• On writing letters to the editor: “I enjoyed writing the odd letter for publication. It gave me some satisfaction, however evanescent… These were mere pinpricks, of course, in a massive wall of orchestrated press animosity, but I hoped they showed I was still alive and that my (sparsely attended) corporate funeral had not yet taken place.”

• On his Bridle Path oasis: “Barbara and I walked (holding hands, as the Globe and Mail breathlessly reported) in the late afternoon along the street my father had created 50 years before when he developed the neighbourhood now known as the Bridle Path. I had carefully assembled and placed 20,000 books in the libraries and there remained important traces of the original house where I was brought up. The long-serving staff were thoughtful and unobtrusive, and the swimming pool and chapel I had built were great sources of exercise and refreshment of body and spirit.”

Going on the word of Conrad Black alone (and his long, obscure words are the only ones we have), the Lord has basically become the business equivalent of Charlie Brown (same initials, even!). He’s just trying to do the right thing. But arch-nemesis Richard Breeden keeps pulling that football out of the way before he can kick it.

Black’s sale of Hollinger Inc. to the dapper Barclay brothers is blocked by the Hollinger International board, which challenges its validity. Even Black’s old pal Henry Kissinger votes against it, prompting the Baron to volley an “Et tu, Brute?” at the former Secretary of State (kind of a lame zinger, no? We’re sure Kissinger has heard much worse). This leads to a whole slew of trials, depositions and conferences with one Judge Leo Strine, a Delaware adjudicator who is, according to Black, as provincial as he is obtuse.

Meanwhile, Black’s new status as high society pariah is having an impact on Barbara. First she’s axed from the Telegraph, and then from Maclean’s; the editor who fired her, Black is quick to point out, often asked him for a job but never even passed an interview. Black insists that he’s devastated by his plummeting social status, but also notes that as a historian, he finds it interesting. Oh, brother.

Eventually, the sale of Hollinger Inc. is permanently halted—that’s when mammoth private equity firm Cerberus steps in, offering to refinance Hollinger Inc. Black is suspicious, and a ringing endorsement of Cerberus from Dan Quayle doesn’t help matters (although it provides another golden opportunity to name drop; which, naturally, Black takes).

Black’s suspicion eventually reaches Shutter Island proportions: he becomes convinced that Cerberus and Breeden are in cahoots. It sounds paranoid, but Cerberus’s last-minute withdrawal from the deal suggests that maybe Black isn’t so crazy after all.

Eventually, against the din of Black’s loud, vociferous protests, Hollinger International sells the Telegraph to the Barclay brothers, giving Breeden and co. a sum that equals 30 times what Hollinger originally paid for the paper. Resigned, Black sells his home in the U.K., hoping to quietly move on and become a “modest figure in American finance.” Which would be fine, if we didn’t already know that Black’s definition of “modest” is $80 million a year.

In the words of the Lord:

On Judge Leo Strine’s ineptitude: “It again revealed Strine’s naive inability to grasp the nature of the war that he had aggressively declined to bring to a swift and happy end with his mad and unjust verdict. This was corporate Armageddon, Gotterdammerung, not another Delaware commercial tiddly-winks match.”

On the Times’s reaction to Cerberus’s $2 billion loss in 2009: “The New York Times reported this unlikely freshet of muscular Americanism from one of Wall Street’s weediest vultures, defoliated of feathers, credibility, and investors, with becoming and wry amusement.”

On his loss of social status: “I had gone from being a person of prominence in some circles to a negative ex-presence, someone it was desired and enjoyable to humiliate, if not deliberately, by cavalier demonstration of my new insignificance.”

The press comes down hard on Black as news of his unceremonious ousting from Hollinger becomes public. Blackguard Rupert Murdoch is the prime offender, allegedly whipping up negative ink out of nothing, but Black is most disgruntled by the betrayal of his onetime friend (and former lieutenant governor) Hal Jackman, who publicly smears Black with accusations of a death wish, a Napoleon complex and an “absurd” lifestyle.

Black chalks it all up to anti–corporate governance zealotry and accuses the press of prematurely sentencing him with no evidence (for the record, he acknowledges that convicting the execs at Enron and Worldcom was a probably a good idea). He keeps returning to that one comforting thought: his unflagging honesty will keep him out of trouble (we admit that his optimism is kind of irresistible, but it’s so, so misguided).

Meanwhile, he struggles to keep Hollinger Inc. (the Canadian arm of the company, where he’s still a director) afloat; alas, to no avail. His corporate credit card, expense account and company car are all confiscated, leaving him with no choice but to, uh, use his own credit card and his own car. The horror!

He proceeds to try wrangling the sale of the company to a pair of British identical twin brothers (who, we imagine, sport matching monocles and handlebar moustaches). In the meantime, he gets quietly—but brusquely—fired from his directorships at CanWest, CIBC and Brascan. Of course, he does get a nice goodbye from Galen Weston (who we assume also offers him a lifetime supply of President’s Choice chicken wings).

Jobless and alone, Black realizes he’s dirt poor—his cash supply has dwindled down to a paltry, unmanageable $100,000. He desperately starts selling off his assets (but insists that to this day he has a perfect credit record). The auditors, meanwhile—our old city service review pals, KPMG—muck up his case even further. They originally said the non-competition payments were authorized; now they’ve changed their tune.

After weeks of negotiations and sitting in his library faxing the Barclays all by himself—with no assistance (good for him!)—he finalizes the deal. But the stress has taken its toll. On Conrad, who admits to loneliness and perspiration, and on Barbara, who loses weight, colour and, briefly, command of her senses when she walks three miles in the cold to Don Mills and buys Conrad two combs that he didn’t even need. He didn’t even need the combs, guys.

In the words of the Lord:

• On the venom of the press: “The press, whose members I had always treated with consideration, continued to attack in the vilest and most relentless assault I have seen on anyone entitled to the benefit of any doubt about his conduct. Such reflexive, resonating, widespread antagonism was unnerving and contagious.”

• On becoming a devotee of Charles de Gaulle’s political ideology at age 10: “My francophilia and realization of the impermanence of triumph and disaster, the value of endurance, and the manipulability and forgetfulness of a general opinion dated from these days.”

• On his unfortunate nighttime tendencies: “For the first time in my life, I had night sweats. I was awakened by my racing heart, stirred to acute fear by unremembered dreams.”

• On his return to the commonplace: “It was the last time I would see our corporate airplane…Commercial aviation had been the means of travel for most of my life and I could quickly get used to it again.”

Those non-competition payments bite Black in the hiney this week as Hollinger’s audit committee begins a thorough investigation into the company’s funds. To no one’s surprise—except the Baron’s—it is revealed that the payments (totalling $30 million) made when Hollinger sold off its American papers, were not, in fact, formally authorized. But everyone told Black they were okay, you see, and since he didn’t bother double-checking, this development knocked the wind right out of him.

The Hollinger board, which Black describes in excruciatingly boring detail—we’ll spare you and just say that it consists of Henry Kissinger and a bunch of other old white people—is forced to conduct a formal investigation into the undisclosed sum. Conrad, ever the trusting soul, relies on the clemency of the board, and believes that their collegial bond will protect him. (Hint: it doesn’t).

The inquiry culminates in a dramatic showdown between Black, the board’s Gordon Paris and Jim Thompson, and Richard Breeden. Breeden, as many of us know, is Black’s arch nemesis—the Joker to his Batman, the Moby Dick to his Ahab, the Veronica to his Betty. Breeden was the rascal from the S.E.C. appointed by the Hollinger board to conduct an investigation into those missing doubloons, that authored a 500-page report on Black’s alleged misconduct and was later named in an $872 million libel suit by Black against those who conspired against him. Boo! Hiss!

Anyway, at the meeting, Black agrees that if the money was taken improperly, then it should be replaced, probably thinking that he can just write a cheque and be done with the whole thing. But Breeden means business: under his advisement, Conrad is stripped of his CEO title, shunted into a non-executive chairmanship (his alleged co-conspirator, David Radler, is booted altogether) and returns home in shame to a loving email from Barbara addressing him as “Fat Fingers.” Apparently this is meant to make him feel better.

In the words of the Lord:

• On Richard Breeden’s lovely looks: “Breeden’s appearance was not reassuring: round, flabby face; dull, lifeless eyes behind thick spectacles; a brusque, humourless and unimaginative demeanour.”

• On the betrayal of the board: “The full force of the joyful malice of our enemies was about to fall like a pack of famished wolves on me.”

• On his unceremonious dismissal from the board: “The controlling shareholder was to be transformed at once into a eunuch, bound hand and foot to Breeden’s war chariot.”

Conrad Black begins the third chapter of A Matter of Principle by devoting a page-and-a-half of ink to dumping on the old boy from Shawinigan—apparently Jean Chrétien dangled the possibility of the Governor General position in Black’s face and the Lord was none too happy about it. Dear, dear. But Black rises above the slight, acquiring a much more tantalizing title when he’s offered a peerage in the British House of Lords. Naturally, he calls Tony Blair to tell him the news—because, of course, Black’s friends with everyone famous and influential. Get it?His British citizenship application is accepted after one day (take that, poor people trying to gain citizenship), but Chrétien makes a big stink about the proposed dual citizenship. Black, of course, says that Chrétien’s claim of a legal obligation to oppose the House of Lords appointment is a sham—he even suggests that Chrétien appointed the judges—but nonetheless renounces his Canadian citizenship, a decision he describes as “heartbreaking.”

Meanwhile, changes are underway in the business world. Plagued by the fear of failure, which Black attributes to Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly—and, really, who isn’t constantly haunted by obscure Conrad novels?—he decides to sell Hollinger’s newspaper properties to Izzy Asper of CanWest, an affable but persnickety business acquaintance. Black stays on as publisher—leaving in 2001—and Hollinger nets a cool $1.03 billion from the sales proceeds of the papers (Black is repeatedly assured that all documentation is up to snuff). As Hollinger Inc. sinks into debt Black slowly sells off the company assets, all the while accusing his banks of unwise lending. Again, he’s assured that all the transactions and documentations are vegan-kosher. (He makes this claim on a whole bunch of dubious occasions, like when he’s told he doesn’t have to disclose non-competition payments. Sure.)

Throughout all the drama, he still finds time to criticize shareholder activism and the degraded values of corporate governance. He also catalogues his jaunts with Barbara to Germany and Bora Bora, a destination she originally vetoed due to her “very weak grasp on geography,” and which turns out to be frightfully dull (apparently, one of the main reasons the trip is so unsatisfying is that Black falls and skins his elbow). C’est dommage!

In the words of the Lord:

• On renouncing Canada: “Canada had obviously been good to me in many ways, but I was fatigued with fighting the good fight pretty much alone and being pummeled and caricatured for both my views and just about every aspect of my personal being…I had failed to make any visible inroads in Canada in policy terms.”

• On negotiating the sale of the Southam properties with Izzy Asper: ““The last stages of this complicated sale were carried out on my cellphone from Bayreuth, Germany, home of Richard Wagner, where Barbara and I were attending a series of operas at Wagner’s Festspielhaus…Wagner’s operas are of sufficient length and the Germans so dedicated to eating that the intermissions were just long enough to make an agreement.”

• On Barbara’s inability to differentiate a Polynesian island from a war movie: “She confessed that, actually, she had connected the name with an old film she didn’t like called Bora! Bora! (she was thinking of Tora, Tora, Tora, an excellent dramatization of the attach on Pearl Harbor).”

• On the values of corporate management: “As I had been a lonely defender of the newspaper against the depredations of television and the Internet, so I became a lonely defender of the prerogatives of corporate management, and especially the controlling shareholders. It was a role in which I was to become a good deal lonelier.”

(Image: Tasos Katopodis/ Getty Images News/ Getty Images)

We already knew Conrad Black was well connected, but we didn’t know just how well until we read this week’s chapter. Black is as casual about his dinners with the Pope and Princess Diana as we are about a Sunday nosh at the Pickle Barrel. No big.

For example, French ambassador Daniel Bernard apparently called Israel a “shitty little country” over dinner, while Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) catalogued Europe’s woes. Of course, no social calendar is complete without dates with the Royal Family, and according to Black, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne are the smartest of the bunch, with the Queen in tow (although she lacks imagination, apparently). For good measure, the Baron also lists off the names that populated Hollinger’s advisory board, a regular boys’ club that included the likes of Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, William F. Buckley, former Israeli president Chaim Herzog, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and David Brinkley.

However, the high society life did take its toll on Conrad and Barbara. He laments the public image of Amiel leading Black into a web of ostentatious profligacy, symbolized by the photos of the pair dressed as Marie Antoinette and Cardinal Richelieu. But really, he insists, Barbara leads a simple, nocturnal life, and only has about six friends. Um, sure.

In between tales of caviar and bubbly with the world’s richest humans, Black also makes sure to offer—wait for it—his opinions on world affairs. (Shocking, we know.) For example, the Irish question (hooligans, the lot of them), the dawn of the EU (Western Europe is basically a pathetic excuse for a continent), and Israel (the land never belonged to the Arabs to begin with, and for good measure, contrary to popular lore, Barbara is not such a “peppy Zionist”).

Conrad ends the chapter by insisting that despite his sphere of influence, the only public policy request he’s ever made is to ask Mike Harris’s government to impose mandatory helmet laws for cycling in the park. A true man of the people.

In the words of the Lord:

• On Irish protesters: “I have always found it difficult to understand the appeal of a political movement whose raison d’être is to stage provocative and insulting marches through the residential neighbourhoods of other religious groups. This is perverse even by Irish standards.”

• On the Royal Family: “It would be an exaggeration to say that the hereditary principle has endowed the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth with a super-abundantly gifted first family. Their intelligences vary, but they work hard.”

• On his friendship with the iconoclastic Clermont Set: “From my earliest days as a resident of London, I became something of a habitué of these people…Though I was not prepared to join them in their unholy apostasy, I loved them in a way. They were more loyal to me than much of London’s orthodox society.”

• On his and Barbara’s public image: “The legend created by my opponents in the media that features Barbara and me as latter dissolute Caesars, lolling and social climbing in palaces brought from my pilferage of public companies, is unfounded in all respects.”

When we found out that Conrad Black was releasing a book, we smacked our heads and thought, “Of COURSE!” Really, that Black hasn’t published a memoir before nowsince his first try, A Life in Progress, in 1993 is somewhat shocking—the famously loquacious Lord has never exactly been shy about speaking his mind and nearly twenty years is a long time. To that end, A Matter of Principle is a gift from on high. The gargantuan tome is a timeless, epic tale straight from the baron’s mouth, a juicy catalogue of betrayal (by pretty much everyone), love (for Barbara Amiel), corruption (of the American justice system, naturally), and triumph over adversity (think Dead Poet’s Society reenactments, only Black is Robin Williams and the students are Black’s cellmates). To celebrate this momentous literary event, we bring you the Conrad Black Book Club, in which every week we’ll be discussing a chapter from this seminal work. Read our first recap—and a collection of Black’s most ridiculous passages—after the jump.

Chapter 1: Conrad reflects on three decades’ worth of happier days

Lord Black begins his tale where it ends: in Florida’s Coleman Federal Correctional Complex. Conrad’s prison experience is fairly boring, and he spends his days and nights musing over the collapse of society in his absence. He describes his home study, filled with ridiculous items (a crystal model of the Titanic, a shield given to him by a Zulu chief, an iron copy of Stalin’s death mask), and proceeds to provide a backgrounder on his illustrious newspaper career, which began at the U.K.’s Telegraph and eventually saw Black purchase a large block of Southam shares in 1992. (One would expect the juiciest chunk of this chapter to be Black’s rivalry with Rupert Murdoch, but the baron is surprisingly to the point on the subject, dealing in price cuts and circulation scuffles rather than mudslinging.) He does, however, bill himself as the first adopter of new technology, claiming to have predicted the changes in the newspaper industry as early as the mid-’90s. Of course he did. He is the prophet of our times. The climax of the chapter is Black’s crowning achievement: the creation of the National Post. Through the misty, soft-focus lens of memory, Black touts the editorial prowess of Ken Whyte and recalls the Post’s halcyon youth.

In the words of the Lord:

• On reading the newspaper in prison: “Lying in my bunk after the lights have gone out, I reflect on the ludicrous demise of my great love affair with America.”

• On his integrity as a publisher: “Technically, of course I did have control of the newspaper, but I was always wary, there as in the National Post and elsewhere, of imposing my will too strongly on valued editors, other than for the most overwhelmingly important issues.”

• On Rupert Murdoch (and on The Simpsons, in case we hadn’t heard of it): “Personally, Murdoch is an enigma. My best guess is that culturally he is an Archie Bunker who enjoys locker room scatological humour and detests effete liberalism. I have long thought that his hugely successful animated cartoon television program, The Simpsons, is the expression of his societal views: the people are idiots and their leaders are crooks.”

• On the Toronto Star: “The Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper for many decades, was a middle-brow, oppressively Toronto-centric, anti-American, soft-left product, with acres of flabbily written pap sniping at capitalism, traditionalism, Christianity, and anything remotely America.”

• On the National Post’s reputation for over-spending: “In truth, the annual parties were Spartan affairs and far from extravagant, offering only drinks and rudimentary food. The dancing was more than the usual spectacle given the pulchritude and panache of many of the female staff.”

(Image: Scott Olson/ Getty Images News/ Getty Images)

Critics of Stephen Harper’s prison corrections plan may have just found an unlikely ally—none other than convicted felon and noted fancy talker Conrad Black. On the brink of his return to prison—the Lord is back in the hoosegow today—Black unleashed his impressive vocabulary on the Conservative government in Ottawa in a diatribe wherein he expressed his “violent disagreement” with Harper’s “so-called roadmap” for Canada’s prison system.The Toronto Star has the story:

To Black, Canada is about to model the U.S. prison system — which he describes as an inhumane and unjust factory farm that dehumanizes inmates, breeds an underclass that can never reintegrate and will exact a long-term toll on society.

It wasn’t the close confinement (no worse than boarding school), the strip searches (“tedious”) or the public address system that blared all day long (“extremely irritating acoustically”) that appalled him.

Rather, Black says the penal system isolates and punishes for life “a very large number of people who have been for the most part socioeconomically comparatively disadvantaged.”

Of course, Black’s criticisms aren’t anything new—what’s more interesting is the fact that he, of all people, is saying it. His poetic recollections of his own prison experiences made us gag last week, but Black is no bleeding-heart prison activist, and his complaints aren’t all about cold showers and hard pillows (although he did tell Matt Galloway on CBC’s Metro Morning that his time in “primitive hotels” and cottages prepared him for his stint in the slammer—right, Conrad).

Sure, Black’s issues with the prison system are easily written off—after all, he’s currently a prisoner himself (and apparently he scares female prison guards)—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t on the mark. Also, his points aren’t necessarily based on his own experiences; his beef is more with the larger implications of a system that keeps people moving in and out of jail for their entire lives. So, as long as he keeps up the bombast, we’ll probably keep listening. See you on the outside, Conrad!

• Conrad Black’s broadside against Canada’s prison plan [Toronto Star]

(Images: Conrad Black—Charles LeBlanc; Stephen Harper—Πρωθυπουργός της Ελλάδας)