Tina Brown is every bit an anomaly. A Brit whom even New Yorkers love; she is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, who now confesses hasn’t picked up a magazine in a long, long time. Her innie may be one of the most coveted bylines in print, but her outie dresses the part of a news anchor with a blowout short coif, bulbous pearl earrings and tailored suit that never look out of place, even in the burning Indian summer.
Brown is also the sort of journalist who can get away with calling Prince Philip “so damn hot” and the Middleton family “somewhat like the Kardashians”, as she did in her last outing in India, attending the latest edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival to promote her 2022 book, The Palace Papers.
These days, she reserves her acerbic wit and wise commentary for a new medium, her Substack (or, as she puts it, “the third trimester of my life”) called Fresh Hell, which comes out every Tuesday. Just this month, the long-time royal chronicler called the Netflix show With Love, Meghan “a buzzkill” and politely lambasted its protagonist for “her unerring instinct for getting it wrong” and for being “always brilliantly behind the curve”.
Between two panel discussions and a last-minute book launch (for Rohit Chawla’s Raindogs), Brown hunkered in a makeshift media room at Jaipur’s Hotel Clarks Amer, the venue for the lit fest, to discuss magazines, media and what makes a good editor. Excerpts from the conversation on The Nod.
