Pamela Harriman (1920–97), née Digby and en route Pamela Churchill and Pamela Hayward (with several other near misses), was the uneducated, pretty daughter of a minor English aristocrat whom fate, ruthless scheming, and social climbing propelled to high positions in London, New York, and Washington, and, more significantly, to end her life as the ambassador of the United States to the Republic of France. Her willingness to sleep with almost anybody who might return the favor by lavishing jewels, haute couture, antiques, paintings, chic apartments, private jets, and good old-fashioned dollar bills on her was the key to what she apparently considered success. But that life, as one might suspect, entailed some suffering, humiliation, compromise, and unpopularity—the last of those penances meaning more than one might imagine to someone who eventually cared very much about what people thought of her. For most of us, not thinking of her would be quite an acceptable way forward. She is not, for all her connections, a significant player in the history of the twentieth century. Her latest biographer, Sonia Purnell, a fellow Englishwoman, would, however, have us believe differently.

Purnell is good at her job. One of her earlier contributions to English letters was a life of Boris Johnson, in which she shed light on his dishonesty, mendacity, and charlatanry some time before they became common knowledge. She researches seriously, and has done so for this book, going into archives extensively (including hours of taped interviews completed by a