
In New York in the 1980s Tina Brown, the then-editor of Vanity Fair, was at the centre of a media world packed with dazzling glamour, big money and big names.
By the time she was 35, there were few names more recognisable in the publishing world than Brown, few people who wielded the same kind of cultural and social power, and fewer who had a contact list as influential.
The AFR dubbed her the “Queen of the ’80s”, The New York Times marks her period of editing the magazine as one where she was “the biggest in town” and a New Zealand paper recently recalled her career the “stuff of media legend”.

So you can imagine, of course, when Tina Brown wrote a book about the beginning of her career for Condé Nast - aptly named The Vanity Fair Diaries - every woman, her dog and his brother picked up the book and gave it a read.
Brown, now 64, first made her mark on the media landscape by taking the editorship of British magazine Tatler; influential in its rise from small-town magazine with a tiny budget to one of the biggest players in the London media scene.
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From there, she moved to New York, where she was eventually given Vanity Fair to run for nine years before leaving its post for The New Yorker for a further six.
Her newly-released book, which documents the moment British-based Brown sets foot in New York to the moment she left Vanity Fair for The New Yorker, is a long line of diary entries where the journalist itches her way into the relentless New York social scene.