A Diary of The Lady: My First Year As Editor

by RachelJohnson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $3.25

  Rachel Johnson takes on the challenge of saving The Lady , Britain's oldest women's weekly, in her hilarious diary, A Diary of The Lady: My First Year and a Half as Editor . 'The whole place seemed completely bonkers: dusty, tatty, disorganized and impossibly old-fashioned, set in an age of doilies and flag-waving patriotism and jam still for tea, some sunny day.' Appointed editor of The Lady - the oldest women's weekly in the world - Rachel Johnson faced the challenge of a lifetime. For a start, how do you become an editor when you've never, well, edited? How do you turn a venerable title, full of ads for walk-in baths, during the worst recession ever? And forget doubling the circulation in a year - what on earth do you wear to work when you've spent the last fifteen years at home in sweatpants? Will Rachel save The Lady - or sink it? Action-packed, entertaining, marvellously indiscreet. Johnson is everything you want in a diarist and has a compulsive habit of saying the wrong thing . ( Sunday Times ). She's a loose cannon. All she thinks of is sex. You can't get her away from a penis . (Mrs Julia Budworth, co-owner, The Lady ). A total romp, wonderfully readable, unflinchingly described . ( Guardian ). Hysterical. For the first time, everyone is talking about The Lady for reasons other than nannies . (Piers Morgan). Rachel Johnson is a journalist who has written two previous novels and two volumes of diaries. The Mummy Diaries , Notting Hell , Shire Hell and A Diary of The Lady are all available now from Penguin.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $3.25

  'All I knew about The Lady was what all middle-class mothers of a certain age and income bracket knew about The Lady . It was where you got a nanny from. End of.' When Rachel Johnson was appointed the new editor of the oldest women's weekly magazine in the world, she was facing the challenge of a lifetime. For a start, how do you become an editor when you've never, really, edited? How do you turn around a venerable title, full of gloomy articles on watery eyes and ads for walk-in baths, into a totally cookin' property ...during the worst recession EVER? And forget about doubling the circulation in a year at The Lady - what on earth do you WEAR to work when you've spent the last fifteen years sitting at home in sweatpants? As she puts on her best Bree Van der Kamp silk blouse and penetrates the time-capsule six-storey cream and pink HQ in Covent Garden - with its Fred West basement, Ladies' Smoking Room, Anne Frank Annexe and wall safe filled with custard creams - she soon realizes: if The Lady was ever to become more hip than hip replacement, it would need emergency surgery. And fast. This is Rachel's riotous and alarmingly frank account of her first year as her Ladyship, as she tackles redesigning the magazine, drags the title from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, persuades big names to write for peanuts, attempts to sell advertising space to the bewildered executives of Astroglide (don't ask), tackles her dreaded intray, but above all tries to persuade her existing readers to keep going and new ones to hop on board. Will Rachel save The Lady - or sink it?