‘Every prospect pleases,/and only man is vile.’ The lines of Bishop Heber’s hymn leap to mind while reading Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker. There are lovely settings in the book: a manor house in the chalk hills of Dorset, a castle on its own island in Kent, a chateau at Cap d’Antibes, the schooner Le Créole in the Mediterranean, Villa La Leopolda near Cap Ferrat, spanking townhouses in Neuilly, Manhattan and Georgetown, resplendent embassies and hotels. But the fine landscapes and buildings are filled with horrid incorrigibles. The book’s central character, Pamela Harriman (1920–97), was a callous, hardy, machinating, stylishly veneered gold-digger. The men in her life were rebarbative. Their brutality, egotism, greed, self-indulgence and corrupt successes make Kingmaker a disheartening read.

This soulless Anglo-American version of Alma Mahler was the scantily educated daughter of the eleventh Baron Digby. She appalled her parents with a sudden but calculating marriage in 1939 to Randolph Churchill, only son of Winston. Randolph resembled Boris Johnson in his craving to be loved, amazement when he wasn’t, insolence and spurious erudition. On their wedding night he kept her awake by noisy farting while he read aloud Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Copulation was an act of conquest, not intimacy, for him. He was a coarse drunk, seedy adulterer and wild gambler, who kicked furniture, punched walls and left his second wife ‘piebald’ from blows with his fists and boots. Pamela gave birth to her only child, Winston, when she was twenty. She was a capricious and negligent mother who found her son morose and unappealing. 

The newspaper magnate Max Beaver­brook gave her £3,000 and body-hugging evening dresses to launch her as a grande horizontale on super-rich or strategically influential Americans. She bedded the humourless patrician plutocrat Averell Harriman, whom Roosevelt had sent to London to manage the Lend-Lease programme. He paid her expenses and