'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 her career. For a start, how do you become an editor when you have never edited? How do you turn around a venerable title, full of gloomy articles on watery eyes and ads for stairlifts and walk-in baths into a hot and happening property...during the worst recession ever? And forget doubling the circulation in a year - what on earth do you WEAR as editor when you've spent the last fifteen years in GAP sweatpants? As she puts on her twinset and penetrates the dusty, 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 realises: if The Lady was to ever become more hip than hip replacement, it would need emergency surgery. And fast. This is Rachel's hilarious, and at times suicidally frank, account of her first year as her Ladyship, as she tackles redesigning the magazine, drags the title into the second (if not yet the third) millennium, tries to persuade big names to write for peanuts, attempts to sell advertising space to the bewildered executives of Astroglide (don't ask), bravely tackles her dreaded intray and 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?
Used availability for Rachel Johnson's A Diary of the Lady