What an unexpected treat this book was. It's just this side of a hagiography, and I'm not entirely buying what Purnell is selling: I strongly suspect, for example, that you do not want Pamela Harriman as your stepmother. But so many juicy details and anecdotes and quotes -- it's hard to put the book down and impossible to resist its pleasures. In the end I could not disagree with Bill Clinton's appraisal of his longtime friend: “Was she calculating? . . . Yes, tell me someone in politics who isn’t. Was she ambitious? Yes, she was a child when she married the [soon to be] prime minister’s son and found a way to make herself useful during the war at some risk to herself. Did she have a good time living? Yes, she did. Good for her.”