Conrad Black is a graduate of Carleton, Laval, and McGill Universities, the author of biographies of Maurice Duplessis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard M. Nixon, was the publisher of the London (UK) Telegraph newspapers and Spectator from 1987 to 2004, and founded the National Post.
A total of 17 criminal charges for corporate financial mismanagement was alleged or laid against him in the U.S. in 2005, of which four were abandoned, nine led to acquittals, and he served 29 months in a U.S. federal prison as a tutor in English and teacher of American history, until the remaining counts were vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court. Two were later revived by a lower court and remain under appeal, and Conrad Black is now living in New York.
His columns and reviews have frequently appeared throughout this time in a large number of publications in Canada, the US, and the UK, especially the National Post and the National Review, and he has been a life peer in the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour, since 2001.
