'I HAVE an extravagance that knows no bounds.'' Journalist, author and society queen Barbara Amiel's words have returned to haunt her. Akin to Marie Antoinette's let them eat cake, they will go down in history as a memorable show of arrogance made by a powerful woman before her cut-glass world cracked around her.

To Amiel's horror, she and husband Conrad Black, former chairman of the Telegraph Group, are accused of using the New York-based publishing company Hollinger International, which he built from scratch, as a ''piggy bank'' to fund their lifestyles.

Such is Lady Black's upset over her fall from grace that she has abandoned Lord Black in the US and remains 3000 miles away in their palatial Kensington home with only two butlers, three maids, domestic staff, chef and chauffeur for company.

Meanwhile, Hollinger is blaming the couple's greed and extravagance for transforming the newspaper publishing company into a ''corporate kleptocracy''. In a lawsuit for (pounds) 700m, it is claimed that money was siphoned off - from vast amounts to fund private jets down to Lady Black charging Hollinger to tip the doorman of Bergdorf-Goodman in New York.

Another example given by lawyers showed that, between 2000 and 2003, Hollinger was billed for $90,000 to refurbish a 1958 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith so the lord and lady could travel around London in style ''without paying for the ride''.

As the scandal rumbles on, what emerges is the incredible tale of how Amiel arrived at this point. At the height of their success, she and Black, her fourth husband, mixed with the world's super rich - a billionaire existence which is said to have stretched them to breaking point.

Amiel, eloquent and witty, was a must-have dinner guest in elite homes. Now aged 63, but looking 10 years younger, she attributes her youthfulness and glamour not to her New York dermatologist, Botox pioneer Pat Wexler, but to ''accomplishment'', which ''will do more for your allure than any cream, lipstick or frock''.

It was a long and difficult climb, however, to the riches and status she always desired. Hers was a comfortable start in life as part of an intellectual British family. Her parents divorced and her mother moved her and younger sister Ruth to Canada before remarrying. Turmoil followed. Barbara didn't get on with her

stepfather and, after two half-brothers were born, the beautiful, stubborn and single-minded young woman left home at 15 to work in a factory. The future style queen struggled to get by and wore second-hand clothes.

Drug dependency was to follow and the news that her father had committed suicide. She worked her way through college and edited the student newspaper at the University of Toronto.

Years later she might have had three failed marriages behind her and a personal life that read like a soap plot, but Amiel's career was a success. She worked hard and moved quickly from being a typist to become a celebrated journalist and the first female editor of the daily Toronto Sun.

Her private life remained eventful. In her autobiography, Confessions, she admitted having been addicted to anti-depressants and painkillers. There was also a back-street abortion aged 24, which left her unable to have children. This fact has often been used by commentators to explain her need for material objects to fill her life.

After making a journalistic name for herself in Canada, she decided to return to the UK in the 1980s and gained a similar high profile as a columnist in the Sunday Times. She became known as the Iron Lady of Wapping because of her attacks on the liberal establishment. Amiel would go on to be the right-wing ranter in the Telegraph she is best known as today.

Soon after arriving in the UK, she found herself at all the right parties, mingling with people of influence and wealth. On meeting newspaper tycoon Conrad Black there was an undoubted chemistry. He was a multi-millionaire publisher with interests in several continents. Amiel was accomplished in her own right. Black's marriage was rumoured to be shaky and soon after his wife, Joanna, left him, the two became a couple. They were married at a Chelsea register office in 1992. He was 47, she was 51. They started as they meant to go on, with three wedding celebrations, in London, Toronto and Washington. Amiel then began her rapid ascent to society lady extraordinaire.

She has written that power attracts women to men. It ''plays to a woman's most basic instincts of vulnerability,'' she has said. Conrad Black, she believed, ''understood power'', and theirs became a marriage of mutual passion for extravagant living. In the upper strata of London society there is a belief that he might not have reached the current crisis point had he not met his second wife. Friends of the disgraced tycoon insist that

before Amiel he was satisfied with ''just being rich''. That all changed, they say, when the highly ambitious Ms Amiel came on the scene.

''They overstretched themselves,'' said a friend.

Suddenly, the second Mrs Black found herself being sought out by prime ministers such as Margaret Thatcher and was being shown to her seat in the royal box at the Queen's Jubilee Party at the palace. Her rebranding was working. From an ordinary start, she was being looked on as special. The Blacks entertained lavishly at their Kensington home, two townhouses knocked together and furnished in period style. Their annual summer party, held on the second Thursday of June, was one of the most established events in the social calendar.

A journalist recalls being ushered to one of the Blacks' parties to make up numbers only to be shown out the back door on arrival as she ''was no longer needed''.

Stories of Amiel's ability to spend money were also becoming widespread. At a dinner party, she was said to have felt ''demeaned'' as other guests were leaving to catch their private jets. She advised Black to sort the situation out and, not to be outdone, he bought two aircraft which were run for (pounds) 4m a year on the company.

At the time, Amiel was quoted as saying without a trace of irony: ''It is always best to have two planes as no matter how well one plans ahead, one always finds one of them is on the wrong continent.''

She is said not to have hesitated over taking a private Gulfstream to Paris for an afternoon's shopping. Family homes were bought for tens of millions of pounds in Palm Beach, Toronto, New York and London.

Born in Montreal in 1944, Black gave up Canadian citizenship to accept a British peerage in 2001. His wife then became a lady. Her fortune looked good but then came a display of exhibitionism that heralded her downfall.

Amiel took journalists from American Vogue through her London mansion and couldn't resist showing them her eye-popping collection of designer belongings. Furs, evening gowns, casuals, gloves, belts and shoes spilled out of two rooms and an area in her private gym.

One closet contained 12 Hermes crocodile bags, with a value of more than (pounds) 50,000 and an even more valuable collection of 40 Pellegrino jewel-handled evening bags. Other shelves groaned under the weight of more than 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes costing from (pounds) 250 to (pounds) 800 a pair. She was quoted as saying she thought nothing of spending (pounds) 35,000 on a cocktail dress and showed the Vogue team a necklace worth (pounds) 100,000.

Amiel didn't stop to think that shareholders of Hollinger International, as well as Vogue readers, may have been interested in her taste for such finery. An investigation was launched by the company to find out how the modest-sized business, of which Lady Black was vice-president and Lord Black chairman and chief executive, could sustain such incredible personal wealth.

It was subsequently decided by business lawyers that Amiel, Black and several associates had ''freely plundered the company coffers to subsidise their own lifestyles''.

Lord Black has consistently denied any wrongdoing and, in a statement, Ravelston - a company in which he has a 65% stake - described the latest lawsuit as ''tabloid journalism masquerading as law''.

Whatever the future holds for Conrad Black, those who know his wife don't doubt for a moment that she will turn this crisis to her advantage.

''She needs to be loved, admired and envied,'' says one long-time acquaintance. ''She's working on re-establishing herself already.''

Surely Amiel must have known that her opulent fairytale couldn't go on forever?

In fact, it seems her fate was already reflected in a comment

she made earlier. She said: ''In a century that has seen the collapse of

the Austro-Hungarian, British and Soviet empires, reversal of fortune is this rich bitch's reality.''