I’d been working as a freelance journalist for over a decade when I began researching this book. It is largely based on interviews with women working in newspaper, magazine, radio and television journalism as reporters, editors, presenters, and producers. However, the back story includes the contributions of early pioneers like newswomen Cora Hind and Kit Coleman, and radio personalisties Claire Wallace, Helen James and Judith Jasmin whose stories I gleaned from archives, and the memories of the younger women they’d mentored. Among the major figures featured are Barbara Frum, Adrienne Clarkson, Jan Tennant, June Callwood and Michele Landsberg, Barbara Amiel and Margaret Trudeau. The model I used was Giorgio Vasari’s The Live of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, a collection of biographies published in 1550. Vasari, who was himself a painter and architect, is still read but was not highly regarded by my art history professors who considered the book more gossip than scholarship. I see The Lives as documentary, actually. Primary source material.  The sketches of the artists living and working in Italy in the 16th Century constitute a firsthand account by someone who was part of the scene when the Renaissance was happening. We’d call it cultural history, or creative non-fiction today. Or first-person journalism.