Penile State mourns loss of Conradic social vivacity

[Convicted tax evader Conrad] Black is free on $21 million (£10 million) bail and, barred from returning to his native Canada, awaiting sentencing at his waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

In e-mails to Men’s Vogue magazine published recently, he said that he had been reading “apposite passages from ecclesiastical authors, especially Cardinal Newman” and trying to spend an hour each day drinking a “good French white wine” on his terrace.

“This experience tends to reduce social activity, not so much because of fewer invitations, though there is some of that, but because it has been such an ordeal anyone would naturally be less sociable. The subject of these travails becomes an 800lb gorilla nobody mentions. Timesonline