Tina Brown

Tina Brown in 2012

Christina Hambley Brown, Lady Evans CBE (born 21 November 1953), is an English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, broadcaster, and author. She is the former editor in chief of Tatler (1979 to 1982), Vanity Fair (1984 to 1992) and The New Yorker (1992 to 1998), and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast (2008 to 2013).

Quotes

1981–2003

• I had to admit I liked him hughly. He was in an American country gentleman's three-piece suit and heavy shoes, and was by turns urbane and shady. His face seems to have been made for the cartoonist's distortion the gargoyle lips, deep furrows in the brow, the hint of five o'clock shadow that gives him such an underworld air when he's sunk in thought.
• The truth is that, although he'll be trouble, he'll 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. [Bernard] Shrimslev had to ask himself what the ordinary man wanted to read that week. Stafford Somerfield knew!"
  • Diary entry (17 January 1981) of Harry Evans and Brown's dinner with Rupert Murdoch (who was about to purchase Times Newspapers Ltd), reprinted in Harry Evans Good Times Bad Times and a serialisation in The Observer (9 October 1983), p. 28

• Princess Diana, the shy introvert unable to cope with public life, has emerged as the star of the world's 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.
  • "The Mouse That Roared", Vanity Fair (October 1985)

• 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.
  • "The Mouse That Roared", Vanity Fair (October 1985)
  • In 1981, the year of King Charles' first marriage, it was still considered essential for wives of leading members of the royal family to be virgins at the time of marriage.

• [Conrad] Black's 1,300-page biography has had stellar reviews. Historians from Alan Brinkley to Daniel Yergin have hailed it as the best single volume on the many perplexing aspects of FDR's political life. A belligerent neo-con before it was fashionable, Black has paradoxically contrived to write an admiring appraisal of Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor reluctance to fight the Nazis and the economic interventionism of the New Deal for which neo-cons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as "that man".
  • "Company Hates Misery", The Washington Post (December 3, 2003)

2019–2022

• Large, blond, and ebullient in his well-tailored suits, my father filled a room with his commanding height and broken nose.
  • From the introduction to The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983—1992, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017, p. 16
  • Referring to the British film producer George H. Brown.

• When did Britain go out of its mind? As a transplant from London to New York, I'm often asked that question.
• The last hard patriotic triumph in most Brit's recall was Margaret Thatcher's 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.
  • "How Britain Lost the Plot Over Brexit", Time (June 6, 2019)

• 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 he'd told me was true in terms of what the budget was going to be. And I'd never walked into that weird crepuscular den of Miramax when he was courting me. I'd 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 I'm sitting there in this dark room with Harvey [Weinstein] yelling and screaming, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is insane.
  • From an interview, as cited in "Tina Brown on the Future of the Royal Family", The New York Times magazine (February 15, 2020)
  • Explaining why she regretted her move in 1998 from The New Yorker to Talk media (which soon founded Talk magazine) after about 25 minutes.

• International diplomacy rarely offers encounters with angels. But Prince Andrew's 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 Eugenie's wedding and Princess Beatrice's 21st birthday party, and went goose-hunting with Kazakhstan's then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
  The Kazak strongman's baby-faced billionaire son-in-law bought the Yorks's 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 Yorks's occupation was a new zoning designation that put it under the direct flight path of Heathrow Airport.
  • Extract from The Palace Papers, as cited in "'Jeffrey Epstein told people that Prince Andrew was an idiot – but a useful one'", The Telegraph (11 April 2022)

• 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 Majesty's 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.
  • "Queen Elizabeth II Understood the Weight of the Crown", The New York Times (September 9, 2022)

About Tina Brown

• By many measures, though, Brown's 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 Brown's visit, centered on the lunch. Brown finds that she's extensively misquoted—unsurprisingly, since Mostyn-Owen wasn't there. "Boris Johnson is an epic shit," Brown concludes. "I hope he ends badly."
  • Nathan Heller "How Tina Brown Remixed the Magazine", The New Yorker (13 November 2017)
  • The heiress was Olivia Channon, daughter of the Conservative cabinet minister Paul Channon and granddaughter of the diarist Henry "Chips" Channon. Allegra Mostyn-Owen was Johnson's first wife.