Some Times in America

America may no longer have a special relationship with Britain, but it still has one with Alexander Chancellor. Nurtured during the war on American food parcels and American musicals, he grew up in England believing the United States to be some kind of paradise. But it was many years before he had a chance to verify this assumption. Certainly nobody could have predicted in 1944, when he was four years old and his father introduced him to American culture by bringing back records of Oklahoma! from New York, that almost fifty years later he would take up the famous monocle of Eustace Tilley, mascot of the New Yorker, and edit its 'The Talk of the Town' section.By way of Eton, Cambridge, Reuters, ITN, the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph, Chancellor arrived in his first job based in America in 1986 as Washington correspondent for the then new British daily, the Independent. In the American capitol he explored the social life of Georgetown as well as party politics and the running of government.But it was Tina Brown's invitation in 1992 to join the New Yorker that sealed his fate. Protesting that he had never lived in New York (before anyone else could), Chancellor was persuaded to join Brown's high-profile take-over of this august institution. It was asking for trouble of course, but also reaped a harvest of news, gossip, humour and embarrassment that make for irresistibly good reading.