Kathleen Harriman’s letters are particularly revealing on account of their omissions and misapprehensions. The youngest daughter of millionaire tycoon Averell Harriman, she was well schooled in diplomacy, accompanying him to London, where he served as Roosevelt’s special envoy, and to Moscow when he became US ambassador to Russia. Working as a journalist and as her father’s aide, she gained a unique insight into the state of blitzed Britain from top to bottom. But her articles were constrained by the censor and she was eminently discreet in her private correspondence, which was largely directed at a family audience. Not a word did she breathe, for example, about the fact that within a month of Averell’s arrival in England in May 1941, he was having an affair with Pamela Churchill, Winston’s daughter-in-law and her own new best friend. Nor did she disclose her true feelings towards Pam’s obnoxious husband, Randolph. Despite his trying to convince her that women’s brains were inferior to men’s, Kathleen described him in one letter as ‘a very likeable boy’. Yet according to gossip recorded by Chips Channon, she echoed Pam’s hatred of Randolph and hoped that he’d be killed in the war.

Of course, reticence was expected of refined young ladies, and Kathleen could hardly have been more carefully nurtured. Doted on by a governess known as Mouche, she had attended a posh Virginia girls’ boarding school and a women’s liberal arts college in Vermont. She spent much of her time skiing, playing tennis and riding horses. In England she was insulated by affluence. She complained of having a ‘horrible time’ in her suite at the Dorchester because there was ‘no Angela or Victoria to pick up my things & I never can find where the hotel maid puts them’. Happily there were ‘lots of nice nightclubs and places to dine and plenty of people to go out with’. She saw films with Lord Beaverbrook. She went to a new show by Noël Coward, hoping to write a story about ‘the gay side of the war’. She enjoyed an ‘un-austerity meal’ with Channon, who thought her ‘a typical American girl of the more intelligent type’. Not all socialites were complimentary: Lady Cavendish (Fred Astaire’s sister) told Kathleen to her face that she was ‘a bitch to end all bitches’. Still, she had ‘the time of my life. My god it’s fun.’

Partly this was because she was fascinated by the British response to Hitler’s onslaught. Reporting for William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service, she witnessed air raids and their results: Plymouth was a ‘dead city filled with such alive, brave people’. She visited munitions factories and military bases, saying that the