Barbara Joan Estelle Amiel, Baroness Black of Crossharbour, DSS (born 4 December 1940), is a British-Canadian conservative journalist, writer, and socialite.

[9][13] By Persons Unknown: The Strange Death of Christine Demeter (1977, co-authored with her second husband), won The Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best non-fiction in 1978.

[21] In December 2001, she alleged in The Spectator magazine that coarse and reputedly antisemitic remarks had been uttered by the ambassador of a "major EU country" at a party she hosted.

"[25][26] She was accused in 2002 by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, of writing "enragingly narrow-minded and logic-choppingly unpersuasive apologies for Israel".

[27][28] After Amiel lost her Daily Telegraph column in May 2004,[29] Worsthorne described her, of all Black's "neo-conservative columnists", as the "worst of the lot".

[30][31] In a July 2003, Daily Telegraph article, she wrote that the BBC had been "a bad joke in its news and public affairs broadcasting for several decades" with its "relentless anti-Israel and anti-America biases".

[32] A few months earlier, in a March 26 Telegraph article, she said that the BBC Arabic Service had never analysed the power structures inside Iraq and how it merged into the interests of Saddam Hussein's family.

[35][36] Amiel was criticized in 2004 by William Dalrymple in the New Statesman for writing articles that portray Arabs and Islam in a derogatory manner.

Michèle Tribalat, a demographer at Institut national d'études démographiques (INED) said the figures Amiel suggested were "une sottise" ("a piece of foolishness").

[38] Nick Cohen, in a January 2002 New Statesman article, accused Amiel of being one of the people who believe "objectively the anti-American is pro-Bin Laden".

There were a dozen Hermes Birkin bags, at least thirty handbags made by Renaud Pellegrino and over 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes each costing between £250 and £800.

"[41] After the Vogue interview, Hollinger International began legal action in Illinois against the couple and other executives, seeking $1.25 billion in damages.

[15] Black denounced the book in The Sunday Telegraph finding "disgusting" Bower's "key-hole, smut-mongering side-piece portrayal" of Amiel.

[43] Black filed a suit in Canada against Bower in February 2007, claiming that the biography described Amiel as "grasping, hectoring, slatternly, extravagant, shrill and a harridan".

"[45] Amiel accompanied Black to his trial in a Chicago courtroom, which lasted for 15 weeks, ending with convictions for fraud and obstruction of justice on 13 July 2007.

[47] Amiel was reported to have lost her self control in court early in the trial, and to have spoken in anger to a handful of female journalists who gained her displeasure.

"What does it matter if one well-off elderly white woman with too many pairs of expensive shoes now finds her social life largely limited to visiting her dearly missed husband in a U.S. federal correctional institution.

[51] In the Maclean's article, Amiel believed her husband's experience demonstrated gross defects in the American judicial system: "If ostensibly privileged defendants like us can be baselessly smeared, wrongfully deprived, falsely accused, shamelessly persecuted, innocently convicted and grotesquely punished, it doesn't take much to figure out what happens to the vulnerable, the powerless, the working-class people whose savings have been eaten up trying to defend themselves.