This is a biography lightened with the intimate tone of a social memoir, about a woman who was both a bystander and protagonist through some fifty years of twentieth-century British history. Pamela Berry was the daughter of the famous and brilliant self-made politician and lawyer, F.E.Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead, and married the son of another self-made buccaneer, William Berry from south Wales, who became Viscount Camrose and the owner of a group of national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. She had an unusually glamorous and precocious upbringing, spoiled by her adoring father and much photographed by Cecil Beaton, and in her prime used her position as a newspaper proprietor's wife to become the most famous political and press hostess of her generation, harnessing her beauty and wit to influence the successive governments of the day.