The former media mogul Conrad Black has a broad face, as impervious as an Easter Island monolith and nearly as motionless; he expresses himself by tiny adjustments in the narrowness of his eyes, which are narrow to begin with. In court in Chicago, where he is facing up to 101 years in prison for fraud, he assumes a detached, sceptical air, as if the trial were mildly amusing, and happening to someone else. Occasionally, when a former friend enters the witness box to testify against him, he flashes an icy glare. Then there's his third expression - a feline look of pleasure, eyes almost closed - which is rarely seen these days, but which will return, presumably, should he be acquitted of all charges.
Black, 62, considers this outcome a near-certainty, since the case against him is "bullshit". It is also a "joke", an "outrage" and a "complete fraud"; the idea that he and his wife, Barbara Amiel, enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle is "complete and total rubbish". The prosecution, he explains, are "suffering mood fluctuations" as it dawns that they are heading for "a complete wipeout". It is a feature of conversation with Lord Black of Crossharbour that his stormy language is at odds with his implacable bearing: he calls his biographer, Tom Bower, a "malignant psychotic", but were you just out of earshot, you might think he was discussing baseball results.
There are no court proceedings today, so Black has agreed to meet at Chicago's Four Seasons hotel to discuss his new book, a 1,100-page biography of Richard Nixon. The fact that Black has chosen this moment to publish a biography of Nixon is extraordinary but you do not need to know all that much about the former Telegraph and Spectator owner to see that it is entirely characteristic.
Nor should it come as a shock to learn that Richard Nixon: The Invincible Quest is a work of rehabilitation, portraying the disgraced president as brilliant, brave, and misunderstood. It's hard not to see the book as a straightforward act of Freudian projection - or, failing that, as a tribute from one wronged man of history to another. Look what happens, it seems to say, when scandal-hungry journalists and envious rivals try to bring down a successful maverick.
Black bristles at the comparison, partly out of deference to Nixon - and partly out of deference to himself. "I feel terribly presumptuous comparing myself to so exalted a person," he says in his Canadian baritone. On the other hand, Nixon did behave in a "terribly tawdry" manner over Watergate, even if he's far less guilty than believed. "Whereas I am, in fact, an honest man, you know. And I don't believe in lawbreaking. I don't take a cynical view of these things. I take a reasonably indulgent view of other people under terrible pressures, like he was. Reasonably but not overly indulgent. But by the end of next month, everyone will see that any allegations against me are a complete fraud."
We are sitting in leather armchairs in a dark corner of the bar, drinking coffee. Now and then, Black scoops peanuts from a bowl and chews them rapidly. "I have not made any effort to cover up anything."
Black's book is a persuasive defence of Nixon, crediting him with steering America steadily in the world, avoiding isolationism but also knowing when not to get involved in "quixotic or presumptuous" missions abroad. Even the Watergate cover-up emerges as shabby, rather than grandly criminal: Black's point, convincingly made, is that Nixon doesn't deserve to be in a special category of badness, worse than all other presidents, before or since.
"The US simply can't pretend that this guy was some aberration, some kind of mutant, who ran on furry feet into the White House and hid his real nature, until the brave people of the Washington Post pulled back the shower-curtain one night, saw the cloven hooves, and threw him out."
Still, blame for Nixon's downfall must ultimately rest with the president himself, Black argues: he lacked something - some internal mechanism of self-correction - that might have held him back from the precipice. "He did not seem to have the ability to see when he was crossing the line into absolutely sleazy and outrageous things," Black says, reaching for more peanuts.
Judge Amy St Eve is a brisk 41-year-old who presides over the Black trial with a pencil tucked behind her right ear. Locally, she may be more of a celebrity than Black (newspapers unfailingly mention that she is not just a rising star in the judiciary but also a mother of three). The prosecution and defence are ostentatious in their respect for her, and she alone seems unscathed by the salvoes of malice and disdain that ricochet around the courtroom.
When Black's lawyer, Ed Genson, shouts "Objection!" to the government's argument, she tilts her head and looks upwards, thoughtfully, into her brain, as if the correct response - "sustained" or "over-ruled" - might be inscribed there.
One day last week, proceedings turned to the now infamous $62,000 bill for Amiel's 60th birthday party, at the New York restaurant La Grenouille in 2000. As Amiel and her stepdaughter Alana watched from the public benches, the jury absorbed every detail of the event, projected on to a large screen: the $13,000 spent on wine; the $320 bottles of Dom Pérignon; the Beluga caviar, and the guest list featuring Donald Trump, Tina Brown, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and, incongruously, Barry Humphries. Black, in pinstripes, turned his back to the screen. Instead, he watched the jurors, one of whom took detailed notes using a pen with a bright pink pom-pom on the end. She was chewing bubble-gum, and once or twice she looked across at Black, expressionlessly, and slowly blew a bubble until it popped.
Black is accused of illegally using money from his company, Hollinger International, to pay for most of the party, along with various private jet flights, and refurbishment of the couple's New York flat. But the meat of the trial concerns $60m that he and three co-defendants allegedly skimmed from sales of various Hollinger newspaper companies, under the guise of "non-compete" agreements. In one extreme example, Black and his co-accused shared a windfall of $400,000 for agreeing not to open a rival newspaper in an isolated North Dakota town boasting a population of 10,000 (and America's largest statue of a buffalo). The government's case is that the arrangement was fraudulent, for various reasons; and anyway, there was zero chance that Black would open a rival paper there. Genson's counter-argument seeks to turn Black's legendary self-regard into an advantage. "If you know Conrad Black's ego, and you will by the end of this case," he told the jury early on, "you will know that Conrad Black believes everybody wants a non-compete payment from him."
That said, his perceived grandiosity may also prove to be the defence's biggest challenge. If you believe Bower, the peer and his wife lived a life of lavish parties, surrounded by servants whom they treated viciously, taking £250,000 holidays in Bora-Bora and selecting their evening-wear from overstuffed designer wardrobes. In a famous photograph that seemed to crystallise the excess, the couple were photographed arriving at a fancy-dress party at Kensington Palace dressed as Cardinal Richelieu and Marie Antoinette.
Black insists today that this was all so much mythmaking. "It is a total fraud that I lived with any particular extravagance," he says. A certain amount of glitz was a business necessity. "I thought that part of the transformation of the Telegraph was for the chairman to be - and I don't mean this in an invidious way - a somewhat livelier presence around London than [former chairman] Michael Hartwell," he says. "I had certain ideas about how the chairman of a big newspaper should behave. So I tried to conform to that. But I was not a vulgar person, and I don't think anyone accuses me of being illiterate."
This last point seems a strange one to make, until you realise that, for Black, it's all connected. History, he seems to believe, demanded that he play a certain role - that of the munificent proprietor, at ease in sophisticated society, agile with words - and he seems genuinely baffled to have been demonised for trying so hard to comply. Besides, he adds, apparently without irony, "my wife hated parties. This portrayal of her as some kind of Marie Antoinette figure - complete rubbish." Far from deserting him, as Bower has written, Black insists 95% of the couple's friends have stayed loyal, though he is "genuinely shocked" at how "under-appreciated" he was by Telegraph journalists. (He believes his era is "looked on with some nostalgia" now; under the Barclay brothers, he argues, the Telegraph doesn't have "any influence" or "any standing any more".)
He has announced a C$11m (£5m) libel suit against Bower, one of several he plans to pursue on acquittal. "Mr Bower is going to have a real sleigh-ride. And he keeps compounding the libels with these absolutely preposterous [articles] he writes!" He reels off a list of purported errors. "Is the man mad? His malice is notorious. But I would not have thought him so stupid as that."
Black counts Napoleon among his heroes, and sees his own battle in military terms. "For years, I've been pummelled from all directions, and I had to conduct an orderly withdrawal to a defensible perimeter." Then he had to generate enough money to pay his legal bills, and his $21m (£10.5m) bail. "I'm not Bill Gates, for God's sake. So I had to sell some things."
Now he is staking everything on the trial. "And even the people who just wanted me to be sent to prison without a fair trial - even they couldn't say 'I don't want this man to have a fair trial.' Even a malignant psychotic like Bower can't say that. And so this is the point at which the advantage turns." The Nixon book is another salvo in the conflict. "I'm sending everyone a message. I'm saying: this is war ... you'll be aware of these stories that I was living in Toronto as some kind of Howard Hughes, my hair to my navel. So I thought this could be my way of demonstrating to my tormentors that they hadn't even prevented me from writing a book."
Black sees his recent and future life in three distinct stages. "Stage one were the ululations of joy at the so-called downfall. Stage two is the big battle. The press like a big battle ... so they had to resuscitate me to some degree, because you can't have a big battle with a corpse. And then stage three is where I win."
The prosecution's case, he insists, is "hanging like a toilet seat around their necks".
This all seems hugely optimistic, even if you take the view that Black is innocent. The attempt to send him to prison has progressed quite successfully so far, and it seems perfectly possible that a jury might be persuaded - even if wrongly - to finish the job.
(He might serve his sentence in the US or Canada: Black gave up Canadian citizenship to accept a peerage from the Queen in 2001 but is reportedly seeking to regain it.) Would he be resilient in prison? "That isn't phase three. Phase three is what happens when I win."
But you must have given it consideration - would you be resilient? "I don't expect to get there. But yes, I would be. You know, Nixon said some of the best writing's been done in prison: just think of Lenin and Gandhi. Two writers with whom he was not in great sympathy! Nixon was very entertaining at times."
A significant chunk at the end of Black's Nixon biography is dedicated to the disgraced president's life after resignation. It is one of the book's most absorbing stretches; the biographer seems fully to enter the mind of his subject. Nixon's fall from grace was steep and painful - but, as Black tells it, he soon began to recover, gradually gaining a role of behind-the-scenes influence in American political life. The lesson of his book, Black says, is: "Be careful about any rush to judgment." There is something "still there, gnawing away at the conscience of the country, saying 'wait a minute. Are we sure we didn't mistreat this guy?'" He drains his coffee cup and glances at his watch. It is time to leave: he has a court case to win.
The making of a tycoon
Born: Montreal, 1944, into a wealthy family. Tom Bower, his unauthorised biographer, claims he was a rebel at his private school, showing "a personality which savoured inflicting defeat".
Early career: Trained as a lawyer until, aged 25, he bought the Sherbrooke Record, a small Canadian paper, with his business partner David Radler, now the government's star witness. He gradually increased holdings in newspapers (at one point owning 60 of Canada's 105 dailies) and also mining.
Marriages: In 1977, to Shirley Walters, who changed her name to Joanna, "at her husband's request", according to Bower: two sons, one daughter; marriage ended in divorce. Then in 1992 to Barbara Amiel, a rightwing journalist. "I knew what I wanted," she had written earlier. "To be dropped at Selfridges or Harrods to pick up fresh salmon and search for quails' eggs."
Rise to fame: His Hollinger International bought into the Telegraph group in the mid-1980s, making the new chairman a fixture in London high society, and breathing life into an ailing paper. In 1998 he launched the right-of-centre National Post, which had the side-effect of forcing up journalistic standards in Canada.
Becoming a peer: Black renounced Canadian citizenship in 2001 after a dispute with Jean Chrétien, the prime minister. He is understood now to be seeking to regain Canadian citizenship.
Criminal charges: Black is accused of fraud and obstruction of justice. He and three other ex-Hollinger executives are accused of taking $60m in phoney tax-free bonuses. Black is also accused of misuse of company expenses. Hollinger International is also suing Black for $200m (£100m), while Black is promising numerous libel suits.
Other books: Duplessis (biography of the Québécois leader Maurice Duplessis, 1977); A Life In Progress (autobiography, 1993); Franklin Delano Roosevelt (with Amiel and others, 2003).
· Richard Milhous Nixon: The Invincible Quest is published by Quercus next month. To order a copy for £25 with free UK postage, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
