Clarissa Churchill is the niece of one prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the wife of another, Anthony Eden, who succeeded Churchill. From this you might deduce that she is a political groupie and hostess who spent her youth in the Churchill bunker being groomed for Number 10. In fact, as her memoir shows, this could hardly be further from the truth. Her life was far more interesting than that.

Clarissa (there are so many Churchills in the book I shall call her by this name to avoid confusion) is the daughter of Winston’s younger brother Jack and his wife ‘Goonie’. Clarissa is oddly reticent about her childhood. She says hardly anything about Jack – whether he was the son